"Castlecore" Has Come Back Before. So What’s Driving the Latest Renaissance?

The slithery rattle of chain mail has reentered our living spaces. Along with it, hulking wrought metal objects, intricately carved woods, antique tapestries, and jewel tone palettes have been having a renaissance in interiors that’s been bubbling along for a couple of years, but the appearance of "Castlecore" in this year’s Pinterest Predicts trend report made it official: "Medieval is having a major moment. In 2025, Gen Z and Millennials will take home decor inspiration from ancient castles, while fashion and accessories will be Gothic inspired. It’s a comeback of the highest order."

The faux-medieval aesthetic, called everything from "Castlecore" to "Medieval Modern" to "Medieval Revival" to "Weirdieval" on TikTok, has been surging in fashion as well, translating to the red carpet in the form of a sword-toting Chappell Roan and Anya Taylor-Joy going full Saint Sebastian in an ensemble studded with arrows. The "romantasy" novel genre, often set in medieval-ish worlds, is booming, and references from the Middle Ages are showing up in graphic design, too. Elizabeth Goodspeed, U.S. editor-at-large of It’s Nice That, calls the look Future Medieval.

Stella Auer, e-commerce manager at Chicago decor shop South Loop Loft, has seen for herself the interiors look growing in popularity with clients over the last year and a half, accelerating in the last six months. "Our buying as a company has been influenced by this trend," she says, adding that clients are interested in heavy wooden furniture, dramatic chandeliers and sconces, and wrought iron detailing.

That doesn’t mean people are attempting to wholly recreate the Cloisters in their living rooms; it’s more that they’re integrating chairs with rich velvet upholstery, or a big wooden cabinet with detailed carvings. Colors are important, too: "Those slate grays, greens, and rust colors are doing really well for us right now," Auer adds. "Maybe even going into goldenrod [or] ochre." Auer says her shop has even seen interest in big, statement-piece tapestries and wall hangings, 18th- and 19th- century works sourced from France and Italy: "Those have been honestly popular for us over the last couple of years, but I think they’re playing into this trend now as well."

Designers, meanwhile, are playing with the possibilities of chain mail as a decor material: New England design studio Wretched Flowers makes use of the classic medieval armor for its Gothic-inspired lighting and tapestries. Its Crown of Thorns mirrors and lamps are made from interlocking pieces of laser-cut stainless steel or brass. Mexico City designer Maika Palazuelos of Panorammma (featured in the 2023 Dwell 24) works with metals in ways that have the intricacy and heavy, solid feeling suggestive of the period.

It’s far from the first time that the look of the medieval era has been so back. In many cases, modern "Castlecore" is actually remixing elements from an 18th-century fascination with the Middle Ages. "Horace Walpole is the key figure," explains Kerry Dean Carso, professor of art history at SUNY New Paltz. Most famous for his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, which kickstarted the Gothic novel as a genre, the British Whig politician, writer, and antiquarian also played out his aesthetic obsession with the Middle Ages by purchasing a property outside of London and "Gothicizing" it—piling battlements onto a striking, stark-white exterior, stuffing his library with bookcases that culminated in pointed arches, and encasing the main staircase in trompe l’oeil wallpaper based on the ornate Worchester Cathedral tomb of Henry VIII’s brother, Arthur. Walpole called the property Strawberry Hill, and strict authenticity was not the point. For example, Carso points out, he used plaster to mimic fan vaulting, which would have been made from stone in the actual Middle Ages. "It’s kind of like a stage set for acting out this medieval fantasy," she says.

Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, and Strawberry Hill kicked off the Gothic Revival, Carso explains, widely recognized as part of a broader reaction to the upheavals of the burgeoning industrial revolution. That architectural movement ebbed and flowed over the course of the 19th century, becoming hugely influential in America, where the wealthy built castle-like mansions and follies up and down the Hudson River Valley, for instance. It wasn’t just the rich, Carso says; there were blueprints for working-class housing that incorporated elements of Gothic Revival: "They didn’t necessarily look like castles...but they had some castle features, like they might have battlements and of course they’d have pointed arch windows."

Perhaps nobody was more dedicated to raiding the Middle Ages for design inspiration than the late-19th-century designer William Morris—writer, socialist, and hugely influential progenitor of the Arts and Crafts movement, forerunner of modernism. He had his own statement pile, Kelmscott Manor, where he attempted to recreate the medieval craftsmanship techniques he was enthralled with, explicitly as a stance against his mechanized and industrial era. He was particularly obsessed with medieval tapestry. He hated the sheer, cheap, mass-produced ugliness of so much of what he saw around him. He would have loathed Temu and fast furniture.

Modern "Castlecore" is a bit broader in scope than the Gothic Revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries. "What seems interesting to me is that it just seems castle-y generally," says Sarah Wilkins, adjunct assistant professor - CCE in the History of Art and Design department at Pratt, of the trend as it’s being interpreted online, which sometimes veers toward Bridgerton. Nevertheless, it’s unsurprising that people would be pinning medieval imagery at this particular moment. For one thing, it’s a response to years of minimalism and neutral tones—tapestries and heavy wooden cabinets and sturdy metals add color and shine and, frankly, a strong note of weirdness to interiors that’s the opposite of a blank palette. For another, it’s deeply escapist. A firelit room with thick stone walls, protected by a moat, sounds more appealing during times of heightened chaos and fear. People are reaching for armor, literal and metaphorical.

To be clear, the fantasy of the Middle Ages in our collective cultural consciousness is disputed territory. Online reactionaries absolutely love the Crusaders, for example, and there’s a long, ugly history with the far right’s fantasizing of the medieval era. The time period and its most famous figures—both real and mythical—perennially inspire remixing, retelling, and reenacting of the era in visual art, books, film and television, and video games. (See: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Dungeons and Dragons, or Game of Thrones—even Shrek, which had its own comeback moment in recent memory.) Hence Chappell Roan accepting her 2025 Best New Artist Grammy in a comically enormous hennin, the stuff of storybook princesses worn by women of nobility in the late Middle Ages. A lot of different types of people are raiding the same bin for different reasons.

But there’s maybe another fantasy at work, too. The original Gothic Revival arrived in a moment of enormous technological and social upheaval; we live in a time of….enormous technological and social upheaval. At the moment, we’re specifically bombarded by wealthy men in power who are seemingly incapable of shutting up about how AI is going to replace every creative human endeavor. (You can even buy AI-generated fake William Morris posters on Etsy, a fact that would kill him if he weren’t already long dead.) In a recent Slate story, medieval historians Matthew Gabriele and David Perry argue that "Castlecore" opens up an imaginative space to critique a tech-bro vision of the future epitomized by Cybertrucks and AI slop. Popular fantasies of the Middle Ages are often fantasies about pushing back on the powerful and capricious; peasants don’t have the ballot, but they do have the pitchfork.

So much of modern identity and society is based around consumption—and yet the stuff consumed seems to get cheaper, crummier, and more disposable with every passing day. It’s probably not a coincidence that people might be longing for the sheer physicality of stone and wood and velvet as practically everybody spends way more time than they’re comfortable with online, bombarded with poorly made ads for poorly made things. There’s a solidness and a sensuality and a perception of permanence to this aesthetic. It’s a trend that suggests a longing for something other than endless newness.

"Even younger generations are now getting into more of a sustainable lifestyle and getting over fast fashion, which is different from decor, but it comes into play in the furniture scene, as well," says Auer. A piece like a well-made wooden cabinet or an antique tapestry is a purchase that lasts: "You can have it forever, and you can pass it down in your family. And it is timeless enough where it’s not going to go out of style in a couple of years."

That said, no matter how many beautifully handcrafted pieces you purchase, or jewel tones you incorporate, your home won’t be particularly true to the historical medieval era: "How would you authentically make your house medieval?" muses Wilkins. "Probably it would not be very pleasant. It would involve no toilet [in] most places and no heat really. Lots of tapestries, not because they look cool, but because they help keep the place warm."

"There’s no real sense of authenticity about it, but that doesn’t particularly matter, I don’t think," she adds. "That’s kind of the fun of it."  

Top photo of Kelmscott Manor by Frederick Henry Evans/Getty Images

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