The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Nostalgia, and Covid-19

Abstract

What I term “the return to craft” is a distillation of a pervasive phenomenon–the nostalgic, folk esthetic of contemporary Western society that has arisen partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic but also to neoliberalism and climate change. It arises as a reaction to turmoil, offering the comfort of an imagined past, a tangible tactility, and a reconnection with the “old ways,” with nature, and the wild. In this paper, I explore the return to craft as a societal search for foundations via a case-study of its most commercially successful lockdown output, Taylor Swift’s folklore (2020).