From Cottagecore to Tradwife: How Retrofuturism in Fashion Predicts Fascism
Words: D.J. Liberty
Make it stand out
Through the looking glass, there’s a woman. A gingham-frocked, soft spoken woman showing me how to make a sourdough loaf shaped like a flower, or pumpkin, or mushroom. Elsewhere, she shares her frustrations with capitalism and the soul-crushing nature of corporate labour. During lockdown, she reveals via voiceover, she learned to forage for fungi and started a garden with her unnamed partner, helping them reconnect with the earth. Curiouser and curiouser. As I squint at the glass, hoping to catch a better glimpse of this woman, I am on high alert – as many of us have been. For what seems like the millionth time this year, I ask myself the same grating question: “is she a tradwife or a queer cottagecore enthusiast?” She’s someone’s doppelganger, but whose?
In the wake of Trump's re-election, the internet has been consumed in a frenzy of argumentation, recrimination, and debate. Much has already been written on whether the victory could have been foreseen through the intertwined rise of cottagecore, fascism, tradwife content, and “just a girl” culture, prompting wider conversations around the politics and morality of recent aesthetics. Vogue recently reported on Spring/Summer 2025's “surprisingly apolitical” upcoming runway season, fashion seems more political than ever, and ambiguously trad aesthetics are clearly here to stay. As the last half-decade of nostalgic aesthetics continues to haunt SS25 runway fashion, we ought to pay attention to the inherently dual-natured aesthetics of nostalgia and the twinned trends they produce.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
One week after the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian coined the term “diagonalism” to refer to the growing solidarity between some right- and left-wing groups over shared disdain for ostensibly pro-establishment causes like climate science, Big Pharma, “woke” culture, and vaccines. Naomi Klein popularised the term in her 2023 book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which explores the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline, conservative conspiracy theories, and neoliberal crisis in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Echoing Callison and Slobodian, Klein notes how seemingly disparate political movements have formed alliances, including the traditional right, QAnon conspiracists, alternative medicine enthusiasts, small business owners concerned about COVID regulations, New Age spiritualists, and genuine neo-Nazis.
Over the last four years, diagonalism has been increasingly visible in fashion, with the most obvious example being the cottagecore and tradwife aesthetics. While cottagecore initially referred to an imagined queer, pastoral safe haven away from heteronormativity and alienated corporate labour, the aesthetic’s anti-modern undertones drew interest from white nationalists and other reactionaries seeking an escape from urban “degeneracy.”
“Cultural theorist Mark Fisher famously described the “slow cancellation of the future,” the way we have become trapped in the twentieth century, doomed to consume “twentieth-century culture on twenty-first century screens.”
It’s possible cottagecore paved the way for the conservative tradwife movement. With their shared focus on flowing dresses, slow living, and handmade goods, these aesthetics are easily mistaken for each other. Both are responses to unfolding crises within neoliberal capitalism; both express a longing to return to a pre-industrial idyll, a “simpler time” more proximate to nature, free from the demands of bosses or states. Cozy anarchism and homestead fantasy are both captured by the bucolic ambiguity of this twinned trend.
As designers continue to respond to right- and left-wing conceptualisations of the past and future, we see similar formulations of twinned trends on SS25 runways. Between the current climate emergency, ongoing genocide, re-emergent self-proclaimed fascism, brutal and debilitating inflation, and an intensifying housing crisis, the future can feel impossible to imagine. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher famously described the “slow cancellation of the future,” the way we have become trapped in the twentieth century, doomed to consume “twentieth-century culture on twenty-first century screens.” It makes sense, then, that we frequently resort to the past for our vision of the future.
In the upcoming fashion season, retrofuturism was repeatedly invoked by prominent designers including Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Pierre Cardin. Citing retrofuturism specifically, Louis Vuitton’s catwalk featured sculpted leather tunics bearing a striking resemblance to medieval armour. Prada explored the tensions of our “multiplicitous present” through vintage silhouettes and a blend of contemporary and futuristic accessories: one model walked down the runway in a neon yellow windbreaker and reflective, silver dress, a vaguely robotic visor concealing much of her face. Pierre Cardin’s eponymous label brought a colourful burst of metallic, structured silhouettes to the runway, paying tribute to Cardin’s instrumental role in shaping 60s space age fashion. The collection evokes clear nostalgia for 60s and 70s optimism, a time when it felt like there was a future to fight for, rather than a contemporary movement dampened by our point of no return. This was often an explicitly post-capitalist future, the future of John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.
At the same time, retrofuturism is also beloved by figures like billionaire manchild and turbo-capitalist Elon Musk, whose aesthetic nostalgia articulates a drastically different political fantasy. Musk has been vocal about his affinity for interwar and mid-century aesthetics: his proposed “robovan,” a 20-person pseudo-bus, will supposedly feature a “futuristic Art Deco” design; the “Tesla futuristic diner,” which has been under construction for the last two years and has no set opening date, was described as “Grease meets The Jetsons.”
Musk’s fascination betrays the twinned nature of this trend; his feverish utopianism, a frontier Martian fantasy, is the reactionary doppelganger of retrofuturism’s progressive counterculturalism. The aesthetic ultimately signifies doubly, speaking to our confused contemporary moment – a moment in which billionaires whine about censorship and great replacement theory on their own social media platforms as progressives mourn futures that now feel foreclosed.
Set in the printing plant of a fictional newspaper, Miu Miu’s SS25 show, “Salt Looks Like Sugar,” explored the complexities of fashion within our post-truth era. Garments frequently reappeared, camouflaged and rendered uncanny through unexpected restyling: a rumpled sweater became a hastily-tied tube top, a simple cotton dress appeared to lose its collar between looks, and fabrics shifted and changed as they caught the light. “Elements are transposed and combined with a sense of impulse,” the fashion house wrote, creating a space full of “things becoming other, their displacement changing their purpose, shifting their truth.” This collection perfectly captures the uneasiness of fashion in our current diagonal moment. As we step through the looking glass into 2025 and the second half of this strange, frozen decade, seemingly stuck in time, it can be hard to distinguish friend from foe, truth from fiction. As we move forward – if we are moving forward? – are we all doomed to gaze on uncanny versions of ourselves? When we look in the mirror, who will we see?
