#cottagecorelesbians Dressing for Digital Daydreams
#cottagecorelesbians: Dressing for Digital Daydreams
The niche internet aesthetic #cottagecorelesbians soared in popularity on TikTok in 2020 and into 2021. Cottagecore lesbians dress to dream of a life in the countryside among herbs and embroidery where men and capitalism won’t find them. They wear bandanas in their hair, brown Victorian style lace-up boots, and long dresses with puff sleeves in modest floral patterns. In their collective dressing they manifested a quiet glade in the flashy landscapes of TikTok, where “entrance” is often marked with spatial language to enhance a sense of place: “You’ve reached Cottagecore Gay TikTok”.[1] When the pandemic rendered most physical spaces dangerous, queer women began romanticizing nature and domesticity on TikTok and dressing the part, signifying their dress and actions as participatory with the hashtag. Cottagecore lesbians dress for an imagined outdoors, where homophobia and mosquitoes wouldn’t dare set foot, and that lack of rural realism isn’t a contradictory but rather a foundational distinction. A cottagecore lesbian is not a farmer, or even a gardener, but a producer and reproducer of a particular digitally constructed fantasy where frogs are “canonically lesbians”[2] and fawns, warm muffins, and queer couples live in domestic bliss in English-style cottages. The creation of and referrals to this specific “nature” are primarily enacted through practices of dress.
In the spring of 2020, montages of hyperfeminine and androgynous cottagecore lesbians posing in linen overalls or bodices as they stirred homemade jam and held straw hats against the breeze filled my feed. As the world began to close behind me, I swiped up, and up, finding my quarantined body (and mind) a perfect fit for the sheer dresses that evoked both childhood joy and adult stability. A longing for safety and pleasure was knitting the tangles of lonely pandemic fear into soothing cyber-cardigans. The white, moss green, and dusty pink clothes of cottagecore have the temporality of a life of afternoons without tomorrows—a rose-colored filter for the anxiety of lockdown. I made a quiet habit of returning to the hashtag each day. I felt as if I’d found a snowy wood behind the coats in my iPhone.
Examining the style culture of #cottagecorelesbians requires not going deeper beyond the surface but concentrating on the features and textures of the surface itself.[3] The style culture of cottagecore lesbians is rooted in multiple conceptual and historical places: queer crafting and self-sufficiency culture from 1970s landdykes[4], the general queerness of fantasy, quarantine, longing, and looking. To meaningfully weave a #cottagecorelesbians composition will require layering, an essential feature of the style. First, the Pierre Bourdieu garden as “the habitus”[5] of cottagecore, then the Judith Butler bodices, overalls, boot-lacing, skirt-swirling, and light-flecked flower picking that produce cottagecore genders and identities. And finally, the experience of “lesbian looks and lesbians looking” of Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley.
This sun-soaked tale begins with Bourdieu in the garden: the cottagecore habitus. The habitus is both the capacity to “produce classifiable practices and works,” and to produce taste from and within them.[6] The social positions of cottagecore lesbians are fuzzy, but through extensive viewing between 2020 and 2022 I have concluded that these are their unifying conditions: they are around 16-25, they are lesbians and queer women or nonbinary people, they are liberal and often have #blm and #transrights in their profiles, they are mostly white but that has been shifting, and they appear to live largely in suburban areas. Their main “classifiable practices and works”[7] are that they are avid TikTokers, active producers and connoisseurs of cottagecore trends and tropes, and they are heavily invested in how their compositions of these things cause them to be perceived by their peers online.
The material objects of cottagecore include long floral dresses, white blouses with large, ruffled collars and drawstring puff sleeves beneath pinafores or overalls, straw hats, teapots, cardigans, vests, and raffia. The practices appear to be baking, gardening, berry picking, crafting, and reading books under trees, but to be more precise the fundamental cottagecore practice is recording and editing videos of oneself performing these activities with these objects while wearing these garments and sharing them on TikTok under #cottagecorelesbians. Without that “generative” act there is no style culture.[8] This is the internalized garden of cottagecore lesbians, and it is from within its mossy stone walls that its styles are performed and tended to. An engraved stone reads: “Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of life-style…”[9] That must have taken someone a long time.
The “intention in the specific logic” of this garden is to express queerness through crafting and interpretations of gendered clothing inspired by historical dress, storybooks, and Impressionist paintings, and to evoke specific, fantastical representations of nature based more on Beatrix Potter than actual gardening.[10] As Bourdieu asserts, the idea of taste presupposes a bourgeois (suburban?) freedom of choice: country over city, cardigan over sweatshirt, loose fitting over skin-tight, florals over graphic images—when perceived by “specialized agents” the garden emerges.[11]
And now to another layer, at once diaphanous muslin and thick wool depending on the intended weather in the garden. These Butlerian surfaces drape over the body as gestures and garments and melt the “inner” and “outer” to reveal it was all always neither, “How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?”[12] Cottagecore blurs binaries and pushes their extremes in a drag-like manner until they burst open: masculine/feminine, reality/fantasy, housewife/modern woman; “…it [gender] is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation.”[13] #cottagecorelesbians is not an “uncritical appropriation”[14]. Adjusting hats, cuffing corduroy pants, tying aprons, and acts of hyper-domesticity (all performed as short video clips set to music) are “clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization.”[15] Cottagecore lesbians are so feminine, so domestic as they lace corsets and wait for endless pies to bake, and so aware of the #cottagecorelesbians habitus in their acts and dress, that they reveal their inherent performativity. In this cozy drag performance, the hegemony of these dress and life practices are destabilized. Butler discusses “social fictions” that produce a set of “corporeal styles”, and #cottagecorelesbians may be a set of corporeal styles that produces social fairytales.[16]
“Return to nature” aesthetic movements have historically appeared in times of great social change, and criticisms of cottagecore have noted the colonial tones of homesteading and cabin narratives and the privileged position of desiring rural life. Prairie dresses, long brown aprons, checkered patterns, large lace collars, and dreams of uninhabited places reference specific histories on American soil. Cottagecore also draws from English, Celtic, and Scandinavian themes, but it’s an undeniable presence. TikTokers came of age amongst talks of cultural appropriation and understand that clothing is nonneutral, but can this queer rebirth respond meaningfully to these concerns? Style cultures that evoke desire are potent ground for study, and analyzing their origins and digi-psychic implications is nearly vital for postpost(post?)modern fashion fulfillment. Many creators are deciding how to represent a queer “domesticity outside of the binary”[17] that doesn’t idealize a violent past. Creators of color have made efforts to reclaim the cottagecore aesthetic and its transportive space-making.
The final layer is from an ivy-framed window, where this conclusion sits and scrolls through TikTok. Looks, looking, and longing are the currency of #cottagecorelesbians. Many videos are people dressing to find or dream up their “cottagecore girlfriend”. These types of videos are often fast montages of images from fashion magazines or films which are not explicitly queer and screenshots of known cottagecore lesbian couples, composing a whirlwind romance between various models, themselves, other TikTokers, and quite often Winona Ryder in Bram Stokers Dracula. It is a creative harnessing of “the possible lesbian visual pleasures offered by fashion imagery…”[18] and it is attracted to many of the same image tropes Lewis and Rolley discuss, such as “twinning” and “gendered couples.” When classified as #cottagecorelesbians an ad for LoveShackFancy becomes a sapphic love story. Much like the manless pages of fashion magazines, few creators using the hashtag identify as cis men, and much of the fantasy begins in this narrowed looking. The “multi-coded” lesbian gaze that “both wants to be and to have the object” is inherent in the productive nature of the style culture; to like the aesthetic and share in the dream is to want to embody its materials and gestures on your own surfaces and post them online. “And we know by now that the desire—though perhaps coded as such—is about more than just wanting a certain garment.”[19] There is something more emotional than florals and frogs woven into cottagecore’s handmade baskets: dealing with the pain and fear of COVID-19, femininity without judgement or fear, and loving openly. Cottagecore lesbians dream of dressing and dress to dream. Yearning is the destination.
1. Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley, “Ad(Dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbians Looking,” in Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (Taylor & Francis Group, 1996)
2. Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th Anniversary Edition (Routledge, 2006), 175–93
3. “Cottagecore,” Aesthetics Wiki, accessed March 1, 2022, https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore
4. Eleanor Medhurst, “Cottagecore Lesbians and the Landdyke Legacy,” Dressing Dykes (blog), August 28, 2020, https://dressingdykes.com/2020/08/28/cottagecore-lesbians-and-the-landdyke-legacy/
5. Rebecca Jennings, “Cottagecore, Taylor Swift, and Our Endless Desire to Be Soothed,” Vox, August 3, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/8/3/21349640/cottagecore-taylor-swift-folklore-lesbian-clothes-animal-crossing
6. Isabel Slone, “Escape Into Cottagecore, Calming Ethos for Our Febrile Moment,” The New York Times, March 10, 2020, sec. Style, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/style/cottagecore.html
7. “Romanticism,” in Wikipedia, February 9, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romanticism&oldid=1070767361
8. @keturahmaree, Stay Awhile, 2020, https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdA6WDQy/
9. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Habitus and the Space of Lifestyles,” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 169–225
10. “What Is Cottagecore and Why Do Young Queer People Love It?,” Autostraddle (blog), September 30, 2020, https://www.autostraddle.com/what-is-cottagecore-and-why-do-young-queer-people-love-it/
11. Jessica Lindsay, “What Is Frog TikTok, and Why Does It so Often Cross over with Lesbian TikTok?,” Metro (blog), July 8, 2020, https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/08/what-frog-tiktok-why-often-cross-lesbian-tiktok-12961023/
12. Rowan Ellis, Why Is Cottagecore so Gay?, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5odKiL7jRW0
13. @megafrogirl, You’ve Reached Cottagecore Gay TikTok (TikTok, 2020), https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdSK2k8B/.
[1] @megafrogirl, You’ve Reached Cottagecore Gay TikTok (TikTok, 2020), https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdSK2k8B/.
[2] Rebecca Jennings, “Cottagecore, Taylor Swift, and Our Endless Desire to Be Soothed,” Vox, August 3, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/8/3/21349640/cottagecore-taylor-swift-folklore-lesbian-clothes-animal-crossing.
[3] Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th Anniversary Edition (Routledge, 2006), 175–93.
[4] Eleanor Medhurst, “Cottagecore Lesbians and the Landdyke Legacy,” Dressing Dykes (blog), August 28, 2020, https://dressingdykes.com/2020/08/28/cottagecore-lesbians-and-the-landdyke-legacy/.
[5] Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions.”
[6] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Habitus and the Space of Lifestyles,” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 169–225. [7] Bourdieu.[8] Bourdieu.[9] Bourdieu.[10] Bourdieu.[11] Bourdieu.
[12] Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions.” [13] Butler. [14] Butler. [15] Butler. [16] Butler.
[17] “What Is Cottagecore and Why Do Young Queer People Love It?,” Autostraddle (blog), September 30, 2020, https://www.autostraddle.com/what-is-cottagecore-and-why-do-young-queer-people-love-it/.
[18] Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley, “Ad(Dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbians Looking,” in Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (Taylor & Francis Group, 1996).
[19] Lewis and Rolley.
