Cottagecore Is Back For 2021 – And Kendall Jenner Is Leading The Charge

Kendall Jenner has called it; cottagecore is back on the cards for 2021. If you have no idea what cottagecore involves, except that it might have something to do with thatched roofs, cast your mind back to the last year's first lockdown. Do you remember those strange and disorientating days in late spring when everyone (at least on Instagram) seemed to be baking biscuits, going on countryside rambles, wearing smock dresses and generally living life like they were one sip of currant wine away from being Anne Shirley?

Apparently, it was a side effect of lockdown, turning us into people who fantasise about the countryside idyll of owning an Aga and going apple-picking in our spare time. Basically, we were craving the pastoral and the kind of existence where the natural world isn’t something to escape to but something that surrounds us day by day.

The name for all this countryside worship is cottagecore, which, according to Insider, is a term that experienced a significant spike on Tumblr (in likes, posts and engagement) since lockdown started. It’s not hard to see why, with quarantine giving some people the gift of time (so they can bake bread instead of stacking sweaters in their oven) and others, stuck in shoebox flats, the desire to run with wild abandon through the nearest meadow.

And Jenner seems to be bringing the term back out of hibernation. Posing against what looks like a typically groomed golf course, she managed to find a slightly more scrubby (read: natural) flowerbed to capture her latest venture into the realm of cottagecore. Her outfit is particularly in keeping with the genre's penchant for the kind of clothes that would do very well for a milkmaid in a cherry blossom pink dress from Rodarte.

Along with stocks of flour selling out in last year's first lockdown, there was also a run on ditsy-printed dresses and blouses. La Veste, from Spanish stylist Blanca Miro and designer Maria de la Orden, started out as a blazer label but has since diversified into frill-collar blouses that are always almost completely sold out.

Tach Clothing, where everything is Fair Trade and made in Uruguay, has short-sleeved knits that look like vintage Laura Ashley, while Meadows, a clothing line inspiring by ‘Victoriana, prairie style and folklore,’ words close to cottagcore’s heart, has enough blossom-printed smocks and embroidered dresses to fill the Anne of Green Gables costume department.

Now all you need to work on is your sourdough starter and you’re sorted.