Crafting Cottagecore :

This paper explores the internet aesthetic “cottagecore” – its historical origins and rise in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its connection to craft. Cottagecore can be understood as the projection of the core fantasy of escape to a cottage in the woods to live as if it were a simpler time. As such, the desire to make things with one’s hands as a form of self-sufficiency-based self-care has become associated with cottagecore modes of production. This research considers this aesthetic act of making and its inherent digital engagement through the historical lens of the pastoral, Rousseau’s eighteenth- century romanticism, and William Morris’ nineteenth-century neo-Medievalism. The prime objective of this study is to investigate how cottagecore fits into this lineage, and to consider the implications of its digitization.

By examining activity, craft, and digital making, this research reckons with the inherent contradictions of cottagecore: its glorification of the rural idyll, the handmade, and a bucolic isolationism, as well as its coexistence with the technical, the distance from the material through the digital, and the interconnectedness of the internet. These contradictions manifest through social media platforms like TikTok, whereby the most popular of these acts are documented, produced, and circulated, and consumed as content, creating a continuous social loop of escapism. With these key concepts at the helm, this paper will emphasize the ever-growing intersection between production of material culture and the digital age.