For Midsummer this June, traditional festivities celebrating the summer solstice across Europe featured flower crowns, dances around maypoles, and people in embroidered folk costumes. The back-to-the-land aesthetic of peasant skirts, head scarves, and florals seems to seep into fashion at this time of year, but a distinctly folk vibe is now taking over interiors too.
It mixes the sweetness of delicate patterns with a ripple of darkness rooted in ancient traditions and mythical stories. Think cottagecore, but a little bit witchy. Hand-painted walls, vintage wooden furniture, intricate floral decoration, candlelight, and objects laden with symbolism.
With ancient roots, the festivities of Midsummer emerged as a pagan practice in Europe, like many folk customs, deeply connected to nature and rural lifestyles. “All the pagan traditions in Europe were particularly strong in farming communities,” says the UK-based artist Cesca Dvorak, who makes textiles for the home that draw on her Polish family heritage. Poland, she says, is “really rich in its folk culture and customs.” Growing up, Dvorak spent a lot of time in her grandparents’ house, surrounded by Polish paintings and textiles. “As I’ve got older, I’ve leant into exploring the traditions of the country more,” she says.
Photo: Emi O’Connell
Her Polish Folk Dance print—used on cushion covers and rugs—features rows of simplified figures in traditional dress, holding hands as if dancing in circles. The style is informed by Polish papercutting, a craft that developed among farming communities that made home decorations using sheep shears as scissors. Using those shears, says Dvorak, developed these “very bold and graphic types of decoration.”
Dvorak also depicts flowers, which appear across traditional Polish rugs and dance costumes, as well as in painted house decorations. Both folk dancers and florals feature in her most recent collection of wool rugs, A Daze Without End, a collaboration with London-based Shame Studios.
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Photo: Tung Walsh
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