Bucolic Girl Season
Will Hosie on a woman for all weathers
As travellers turn away from the Med — too hot, too unpleasant — the Atlantic coast’s popularity is booming. From Biarritz to Cumbria it has become the spot of choice for the climate conscious and the well heeled. And those who don’t want to be pelted by water guns fired by angry Spaniards.
In this archival essay, Will Hosie takes a look at this phenomenon as it was first emerging — and finds an unlikely heroine in a new kind of traveller: the bucolic girl.
If Sex and the City had been made in 2022, the number of original plot lines that would need to be culled would topple Samantha’s body count. To boot: the flagrant biphobia, altercations with transexual sex workers, humiliation of uncircumcised men, and loathing of the countryside.
When Carrie Bradshaw was whisked away to an upstate cabin by her boyfriend, she immediately lamented her distaste of the woods. That was before she was bitten by mosquitos, traumatised by an indoor squirrel, and failed to order a cosmopolitan from a local drive through. When the episode aired, her bucolic ineptitude was risible; but it was also cool, a sign of urbanised panache and civilisational progress. This was, after all, the early days of the web, when one could only feel connected to the world if one was in the city — and modernity was the only thing that mattered.
This was a time when James Bond drove an Aston Martin that could turn invisible. People who’d never lived in the country did not feel the need to venture there. They splurged on their city pads instead, kitting them out in furniture that favoured glass over wood. Antique sofas were out, and Terence Conran couches were in. The countryside and its ruggedness, sobriety, and self-sufficiency, were antithetical to the cool narrative of the day. Being a country bumpkin in the naughties was, frankly, quite gauche.
But Carrie’s anthropological suggestion that “city girls are just country girls with cuter outfits’’ does not sit well in 2022. This is a year where Kate Moss has upped her sticks and moved to the Cotswolds; Jacquemus staged a show in the salt marshes of Occitania; Dust Magazine cast Parker Van Noord as an intrepid rock climber; Gigi Hadid moved to a farm in Pennsylvania; Colina Strada released a saddle bag resembling a giant broccoli for Spring 23; Brad Pitt and Jared Leto launched vegan skincare lines; mermaids found their way into the glossy pages of Cosmo China; a wholesome evening of crafts and pottery replaced the cokey night out as the it Saturday passtime; and Lucy Williams got married in Andros, an island so primitive you can’t flush paper down the loo.
It sounds like Carrie’s nightmare. But there’s also a certain glamour to it – the cachet of the road less travelled. And in a world where we have everything at our fingertips, thanks to Google and Instagram, that road is becoming narrower and pushing us to search for evermore remote locations, adventurous activities, and nicher brands that show we are in-the-know. Tuscany has given way to a more discrete sister, Umbria; the beach and its rotisserie chickens (aka tanning teenagers) is out in favour of the forest. The monogram label – popular but plebeian – has been ditched by those with patrician and/or artisanal aspirations.
Bucolic girl season is the rustic antidote to hot girl summer – the pre-girlboss phenomenon driven by Mykonos, Victoria’s Secret and reality TV. As the pandemic threw a spanner in the holiday plans of wealthy Europeans (and killed their sex drive – it’s been studied), summer moved upstream, away from the heat of the riviera, in search of greener pastures. It found the Atlantic, and hot girl summer found herself more tepid.
Saying goodbye to Saint Tropez, hello to Cap Ferret is not quite as simple as merely transplanting our summers of auld. The ethos of bucolic girl summer demands that we not only adapt to new destinations, but embrace their comparative wilderness to immerse ourselves in the local culture. In other words: if you haven’t surfed before, you’re expected to start now. Bucolic girl summer invites us into towns and villages far removed from the hotspots of the Côte d’Azur where sunsets are spoiled by coastal superyachts. Those chasing this trend – let’s call it authenticity – have had to move up the coast. Some stayed close enough to their old stomping grounds, enjoying Marseille and the fresh waters of the Calanques, which oligarchs avoid like the plague. Others crossed the country to Biarritz or Ile de Ré, while many Brits ventured no further than Cornwall. All embraced a style akin to that in the music video for ‘Always be my baby’, fittingly made before Mariah Carey had her own hot girl summer renaissance in 1996.
The European aristocracy has long favoured the Atlantic coast over its glitzier Mediterranean counterpart because it is more rustic and discreet, though just as reassuringly expensive. The fact that tourists across the board are now choosing to summer in the same destinations attests to a phenomenon that glamorises the upper class. We see this in America, too: pushback against Californian tech billionaires and Malibu influencers as a new generation of hip travellers with disposable income embrace Cape Cod and old money aesthetics. It’s East Coast VS West Coast, coastal grandmas VS bronzéd girlbosses, Diane Keaton VS Kim K.
The old money aesthetic became a fully fledged trend on TikTok this summer, with images of Blair Waldorf and vintage Ralph Lauren adverts dominating the feeds of impressionable teenagers, who took this inspiration to the same platforms that brought about the very trends they sought to reject. Web algorithms, with all their elasticity, extended the vintage cult more widely. Liguria, for instance, is a more obvious contender for hot girl summer than for bucolic girl season – but Arthur Elgort’s 1992 Vogue spread ‘Postcard from Portofino’, starring Christy Turlington, has found its way onto Pinterest boards and Instagram accounts that glamorise the noble and the bucolic and roll them into one; the gentle with the genteel. Thus, the bucolic aesthetic is not confined to a land of origin, inviting holidaymakers around the world to embrace it wherever they are. It works just as well in Portofino as it does in Dorset.
Bucolic girl season also taps into our current obsession with the sixties: the decade of flower power, escapism, and the mini skirt. From the Hamptons-tennis-court-inspired Miu Miu set to the recent biopics on Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, our fetishisation of the sixties informs bucolic girl summer with a vision of old world glamour. It also taps into our desire for more organic, primitive forms of connection from the pre-internet age; our continuous romanticisation of Woodstock and the summer of love have driven a shroom renaissance. Some of my friends have even taken to foraging. Cultivation is a bucolic girl season trope: diets are heavier in vegetables preferably from allotments, and cooking is homemade. Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland, has become something of a destination for bucolic girls with disposable income to burn, though only in the best AGAs.
The bucolic girl is unafraid to get her hands dirty; to wear her wellington boots and grow her own tomatoes; to make a career out of her gauche and kooky cooking (Laila Gohar, we see you). She doesn’t dabble in the manicured pavements of Mediterranean towns, but in the villages of the hinterland with flowers sprouting from the rocks of rickety houses. The more imperfect, the better.
In that regard, bucolic girl summer also borrows from Wabi Sabi: the Japanese cult of imperfection that reassembles the old and impermanent into something new and beautiful. The Northern European country home, with its damp corners, mouldy walls and jarring furniture, provides the architectural equivalent to this ancient ceramic practice, and the perfect stage for bucolic girl summer, all about finding bargains at flea markets and making handsome clutter out of eclecticism.
The detractors will point out, rightly, how white and elitist bucolic girl summer is. She thrives in environments that are cash poor and asset rich, where the sky isn’t too blue and the water cold enough to cure hangovers induced by century-old wines. But throwing it under the bus would be to miss the point: bucolic girl season invites us to fly less, explore our local environments more, seek pleasure from the little things, be more mature and self-reliant. There was something uncomfortably appropriative about hot girl summer, fake tanning until it altered the appearance of our ethnicity and bedazzling our bodies in jewellery hailing from a country we couldn’t place on a map. Bucolic girl season may so far have favoured a certain style of living – blue blooded and caucasian – but, in essence, she welcomes into her orbit anyone willing to take a break from the unrelenting artifice of modern life. She grounds us, reintroducing her purveyors to age-old notions of craft and community.
Because values like these are more lasting than our tan lines, they extend seamlessly into the next season. Bucolic girls can wear their blue quarter zips in Autumn just as they did during a summer spent facing the ocean wind. A postcard from Portofino in Autumn may be greyer, but our resourceful heroine and her wardrobe are more adaptable than that of the hot girl before her. Their beauty is not confined to a season, or a skin tone, or a filter. She is, in the purest sense of the world, a natural woman.
Only time will tell whether bucolic girl season is just another flash in the pan. We can only hope she isn’t.