cottagecore

Baking bread in a meadow in a dress, as an aspiration. Peaked in a pandemic spring when the meadow was unreachable and the bread was the whole day.

The suffix that turns any noun into an aesthetic — -core — as the fragment that travelled from hardcore punk through 'normcore' in 2013 to a 2020s vocabulary in which cottage, goblin, clown, bloke, tennis, mermaid and 'under-consumption' could each have a core. The record's entry for the most abused four letters in the dictionary, including its own 'corecore'.

A look, a mood, a colour scheme and a set of references, treated as a countable noun and something a person can have — an aesthetic — as the 2014 Tumblr usage ('that's my aesthetic') that made the word a category label, gave the Aesthetics Wiki a reason to exist from 2018, and now heads every entry in this section. The record's entry for the noun that replaced 'style'.

White lace, wings, halos, Renaissance cherubs and soft light — angelcore — as the aesthetic that turned religious imagery into a mood board, and the record's entry for the look that is heaven as an Instagram filter. Its opposite, devilcore, exists and is less popular.

Endless yellow office corridors reached by noclipping out of reality. A folk horror setting authored by nobody and maintained by everybody.

Wrap cardigans, leg warmers, ribbons, and a ballet flat with a satin bow, worn by people who had not danced since they were six. The 2023–24 aesthetic that made the ballet flat the shoe of the decade, briefly.

Hot pink, worn as a position. Was a brand from the start and became a bigger one, which is not the same as living.

The reclaiming of 'bimbo' — pink, glossy, unbothered by being thought stupid, and often politically pointed — as a 2020–22 TikTok aesthetic and a philosophy: 'be hot, be kind, don't read the comments'. The record's entry for the insult worn as an outfit.