Text by Darcie Wilder

For 21of21, GOOGLE SHOPPING and PAPER came together to break down some of the most memorable shopping moments of 2021 based on Google's trending search data. What’s your fantasy? For a lot of folks that belong to Gen Z (and beyond), it’s to unplug from the internet, far away from their phones and social media, just living in the moment. No wonder Google search interest for “cottagecore things” were up 1,350% this year in the US. Below, the iconic comedic actress Jennifer Coolidge brings the trend to life.

Welcome to cottagecore, an aesthetic of Peter Rabbit and nursery rhymes, of waiting for bread dough to rise and drinking the tea before it gets too cold. It's all very Western Europe, idyllic weather, doing little tasks without the grand view of the world's problems. Its impetus, simple enough: a wave of extremely online, mandatory technology and no opt-out clause leaves us exhausted. You don't have to go far to find some concerning implications of cottagecore, as with anything that peers into the past, especially surrounding England. But cottagecore isn't based in reality or history. It isn't of this world, even. Cottagecore is a memory of a memory of an idea someone once had. A picture of a picture of a picture based on an illustration of the countryside. It is all fetishized and picturesque with none of the hardships — after all, this is fashion. Even the worst struggles, when aestheticized, come close to glamour.

The suffix "-core" used to imply some affiliation with punk or hardcore: Emocore, grindcore, mathcore. There are other suffixes for microtrends: -punk, -wave, -house; but as "-gate" is affixed to any controversy, no matter how small, the ubiquity fades the specification. Unlike the other trend suffixes, "-core" doesn't connote any material artwork as something like vaporwave implies a cluster of music works or how cyberpunk implies a larger community of online iconoclasts. The "core" of cottagecore accurately implies the niche with a niche, a devoted subset but without ties to production. No art, just vibes.

Although cottagecore existed before lockdown, it really elevated into the mainstream when most peoples' greatest social activities surrounded video chat software. Our cyberfuture utopia kept the internet flowing, but the constant possibility of communication looks particularly dystopian. Mandated solitude, mandated computer hours; Alone together. It's no surprise that the aesthetic inspired by a romanticized ideal of simple rural life sprung into popularity during a time where any job that could be remote, was.

I began checking the internet every morning in seventh grade, when I realized it was a portal to another space with people who might also have heard what I then considered to be the “niche underground band,” Jawbreaker. Even as I was late for school or half-asleep, even though I had nothing of importance to keep up with. As I was entering high school, my brother told me to "kiss that goodbye," that I would be rushing out the door, my priorities would shift, and I would no longer idle online for three-to-five minutes before running out the door. He was incorrect.

The compulsion continued for years, through high school and college, at which point I splurged on an iPhone. Clicking through my tagged Facebook photos, I would cringe as I noticed my hand clutching the gradient purple case in every single one. A second (third?) appendage. Friends and family constantly nagged me, exhausted by my inattention and compulsive checking of... absolutely nothing. Even then, I knew there was nothing of substance, but I had feelings I could not handle, frothing and bubbling over that calmed with the repetitive tasks of swiping through apps. Checking zeroed inboxes, pretending there was something else somewhere that needed my attention. Even remembering it, the chill of swelling anxiety reverberates in a too-familiar jolt of sense memory. Anywhere but here, anywhere but here.

Cut to my 2021 social media feed, where everyone had found a sort of physical tether to reality: Sewn squares for a quilt, bread loaf after bread loaf, something with yarn being "punched" into fabric to create tiny rugs. We had so much time and so little cognitive functioning. We existed in theory too much, too many images on each others' computers. Even game night on Zoom became draining. I needed something engrossing, something without a screen, something with materials I could trace back to natural resources without trying to understand how mineral compounds become phones.

The knitting came naturally. It was an antidote after literal decades of being tied to the internet and, even more recently, always tapping the screen of my little block game ("It's meditative," I lied to myself) or whatever dopamine-boosting website. I needed something to do with my hands.

I squished the wool. Untangled the cotton. Slid the bamboo needles across my fingertips and tried to remember my mother's lessons. A knit stitch is the opposite of a purl. You cast on by making a slipknot, and then looping the yarn across two fingers, and then the needle between one, then the other. I tried to jog my memory without searching the internet, parsing a bunch of looped yarn knots and making it work until I finally dug up my computer and consulted the experts. I learned how to learn again. The muscle memory came back.

The instructions were daunting until I took them apart. Following one step and then the other, stopping and staring, studying the clump of string. After too long of running on intuition and scrappy solutions, every project finished with the "not perfect but good enough" seal of finality; I began to understand what it was to smash the ego down to size and admit I must learn from the mysterious, disembodied hands of the internet knitting instructor. A great irony that my respite from the online world still required the internet. No matter how much I relished the increasing amount of time spent without looking at a screen, I always ended up going back to look up something else, but it was worth it. Necessary, even. Instead of a mindless scroll, a lesson. Once the lesson had finished, returning to the top of the instructions brought a different clarity. What had been absolute gibberish was now a guide, familiar. I had gotten a hobby.

Cottagecore, too, deals with this dilemma. As our infrastructure has gone completely online, our ability to evade it has diminished to nothing. It is seemingly impossible to live another way, at least while maintaining the social mores we've established. Perhaps this is less of an issue for cottagecore, which is a social media trend about being offline and anti-social. Cottagecore is performed online, whether in the moment (as-it-happens posts, very "I am here on my phone but look at this beautiful picnic") or documented and then later uploaded. There are push and pulls of cottagecore: offline, but logged on long enough to post saying you're off; alone but not lonely, back-to-the-land, but just for the day (cottagecore only exists in daylight hours); in the wilderness but pristine. But these paradoxes only exist in the IRL world. Cottagecore, which is a fantasy existing online, doesn't grapple so much with the impossibility of these because it was never a human experience in the first place. It is an idea.

I measured the success in my hands. The rows of entwined yarn multiplied. I had never before made anything with my hands, at least nothing I could remember. Popsicle stick houses in elementary school? Even my bike repair days were mostly spent next to another body, usually a man, telling me in extremely uncertain terms how the metal parts fit together enough, gear into slot, to make the contraption move enough to get me home. This was different. Decidedly feminine and with the pull of my mother's memory, knitting was the only thing to keep my phone down. The urge I felt to tap into something else, to escape my body and search for some type of "community," was lost. I logged off. I made a sweater, and then another. I tried weaving a little bit and then hung the loom on the bookshelf to be finished later (still TBD).

I didn't recognize myself. I was researching yarn weights and methods and stitches. I was following directions. I frogged projects (ripping them out to start anew) that weren't correct, even as I felt I should just finish them incorrectly to be done. I had never experienced the part of me that demanded I follow directions and give new things an earnest try before abandoning them. I needed something that truly did not matter, divorced from any professional or personal relationship or standing. It soothed me during endless Zoom meetings, hours stuck inside, idle time rewatching prestige mobster dramas. As my day job tasks dried up and eventually transitioned into being laid off completely, I continued to stitch.

The stitches became projects, became tangible materials, clothing or washcloths or other objects that I had previously only experienced fully formed. The end of every project was bittersweet — an accomplishment, something to be proud of; the finished object usually felt anticlimactic and strange. I truly do not knit to have the finished object; in fact, the finality of the piece kind of throws me.

Beyond the memory of my mother's hobby and the reality of what she left behind: The chunky scarves and matching hats, the lone self-striping sock without its match is the present yarn. My own box of in-progress and completed knits: A couple beginner sweaters, hats, random other things I completely forgot I finished. Next to both, a moth trap with the errand insect corpse to remind me that these relics, the physical iteration of her memory and my own whittled away hours, are ephemeral. Impermanent, and even still, the finished projects I never wear and usually gift are not "the point," and even better, there is no point to any of it at all. I usually even forget how and why I began knitting at all.

Knitting links an object to time and quantifies energy and thought, pulling it into the piece. It puts me back in the world, with all its details and discomforts and flaws: Scratchy wool, tangled yarn taking hours to unparse. I never felt fulfilled with any digital tethers to time; there was nothing staring at a screen that brought gratification itself, it only brought relief when translated into something else material: A friendship, a work of art, an experience offline. The urges behind cottagecore come from this dichotomy. No one can ever truly be cottagecore, but it’s a nice place to vacation.

VP of Production & Casting: Katie Karole, Executive Creative Director: Jordan Bradfield, Digital Director & Casting: Justin Moran, Art Director: Malcolm Mammone, Managing Editor (21of21): Laia Garcia-Furtado, Managing Editor (PAPER): Eliza Weinreb, Producer: William Foster, Cinematographer: Olivier Lessard,Stylist: Marko Monroe, Hair: Ryan Trygstad, Makeup: Gita Bass, Nails: Lolly Koon, Set Designer: Brooke Goldberg (for Rob Strauss), Photo Editor: Ethan Skaates