‘Then I was all like, I’d rather get the black plague and lock myself in an iron maiden than go out with you.’
‘Ugh, totally.’
– Shrek the Third
☆
Hand-crafted hennins, hip belts, crotchet and kitschy jewel tones, TikTok is courting a new trend. The eclectic aesthetic coined FantasY2K alchemises visual motifs from the Middle Ages into the colour-pop-clashy-camp fashion of the early 2000s. This revival takes inspiration from various post-millennium media like The 10th Kingdom, the Shrek franchise, A Knight’s Tale, and Ella Enchanted.
As it goes, the ever-evolving, enchanted For You Page seems suspended in Fantasy Land. Influencers, who could very well pass for extras in Merlin, flaunt elven gowns. Chainmail bags. Pointy cone hats. Pinterest collages played to the very noughties, (and delightfully dated) electro-pop ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ by Frou Frou.
Like all things online, it begs the question: how long can the spell last? Is all that glitters truly gold?
Reading the Aesthetic
I spoke to Tessa Domzalski, and she has thoughts. Known more famously by her YouTube channel ModernGurlz, Tessa is a fashion and film expert who conducts style-studies on trend aesthetics, and costume analysis of classic movies like Legally Blonde and Mean Girls.
According to Tessa, this 2000s Medieval revival has something in common with the recent return to analogue; a trend where consumers, primarily Gen Z, are switching modern tech for items such as portable DVD players, flip-phones and CDs. Ironically, this trend is mostly happening on TikTok.
“There’s this whole idea,” she explains, “of posting for people online. People are like, oh, let me make a hennin, and show the process of doing it so that I can post it.”
In the wake of generative AI (how gauche, how unmedieval!), we’re seeing a return to human craftsmanship. With FantasY2K, that might mean paper garlands, paper tiaras, gorgeous gowns and the ever-popular pointy hat. As Tessa puts it, “it’s going to be a taste signifier. You didn’t have ChatGPT make art, you hired an artist. You didn’t buy a hennin from Amazon, you made your own.”
Escapism may also have a part to play. The dreary adult world seems dour compared to Anne Hathaway in medieval garb belting out ‘Somebody to Love,’ or Paul Bettany as a bumbling, boisterous (naked) Chaucer. Cross-generational concerns, Tessa explains, such as the the increasing unaffordability of living, AI eating up the job market, and social isolation could encourage anyone, after enough time, to write their own Happily Ever After. In a sense, the four corners of a phone screen might promise a portal elsewhere. Pinterest and TikTok function as micro-worlds, hyper-curated to reflect the user’s idealised identity and situation. The sadly limited idea of something unlimited.
Romancing the Medieval Past
Of course, she caveats, the Middle Ages were not ideal—on account of all the dying and poverty and such (not to mention the unfortunate lack of talking donkeys).
However, Tessa says, “people can pluck out bits and pieces that fit their idea of what it could have been.” Most crucially, she notes that perceptions of the Medieval era change constantly. Perhaps, in some way, we have the Victorians to thank for Shrek the Third.
Victorians perceived in the Middle Ages a purity unpolluted by modernity, that awful and all-too familiar grime of change. The 19th century Medieval Revival came about as a response to industrialization: fast-paced, technological advancements and factory life carved out a cultural need for something more. Romantic sensibilities were no match for the cold new machine of tomorrow.
Victorian Medieval art flinched away from the present, and instead returned to fantastic ideals such as chivalry and courtly love, centring faerie maids and flowing gowns, sweeping staircases, and gallant knights. Pulling the sword from the proverbial stone, the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere and more, became a key motif, following the massively popular publication of Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Regardless, of course, of what the Middle Ages actually looked like.
Obvious as it may be, it is hard not to draw a comparison between modern day responses to generative AI. When industry outsources humanity for machinery, humanity returns to an imagined past, a soft and glimmering Otherworld. The truth is hardly ever the point.
Patterns of Revival
The next major revision took place in the 60s. The counter-culture Medieval revival made a medley of iconic mid-century silhouettes and short hemlines—inspired by the iconic Peacock Revolution—and Robin Hood style tights, featuring psychedelic, kitschy colours not unlike FantasY2K.
At the turn of the decade, Walt Disney released its stylish Middle Ages romance Sleeping Beauty (1959) and The Sword in the Stone (1959), while the 1960s saw such classic features as Romeo and Juliet (1968). The moment, which largely overlapped with the pro-peace, pro-nature hippies, adopted Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
The collective imaginary, scarred by the Vietnam War, and troubled, again, by emerging industrialization, reconfigured itself in order to escape, and fashion followed suit, rewilding the world into someplace else, someplace magic.
FantasY2K combines the anachronistic imagination of these previous two revivals with a high-camp concoction of audacity. It is the most humourful revival, and the most silly. It is Snow White gifting Fiona a dwarf at her baby shower, a flurry of frightened peasants rushing to the nearest Starbucks. It is Ella’s pop-pink, perpetually partying fairy godmother. In an increasingly self-serious world, we are remembering to laugh, to have fun, and to hold onto Once Upon a Time. It may be just what people need.
For now.
Of course, as Tessa notes, the 2000s Medieval Revival is yet to become mainstream. As she puts it: “On social media, the trend is definitely gaining traction. On the wider scope of pop culture, it hasn’t really broken through yet.”
Mainstreaming the Microtrend
While this season has featured some neo-medieval motifs, most notably Ralph Lauren’s Autumn/Winter 2026 runway, she says that, currently, high fashion is focusing more on tech-inspired and Renaissance style pieces.
More recently, Disney+ has announced a potential TV adaptation of 2004’s Ella Enchanted, led by Anne Hathaway as executive producer. “We might be seeing a widespread adaptation of a trend months or even years before it becomes mainstream,” Tessa says. “Then, by the time we get a new movie, people will be like ‘this is so lame, we were doing this forever ago.’”
She speculates that FantasY2K is “going to end up like a lot of modern trends.” It’s not unsurprising, given the sheer volume of micro-aesthetics produced and popularized by 2020s TikTok: fairycore, Barbiecore, coquette, fairy grunge, coastal grandma, mob wife, balletcore, coconut girl, indie sleaze, bimbocore, kidcore, scenecore.
“A lot of people are going to have fun for the next year or two,” she elaborates, “then everything is going to end up in the trash. A lot of the girls doing this right now were doing cottagecore in 2020. That’s just how the consumption cycle works right now.”
For now, FantasY2K remains a digital daydream. It promises a land Far, Far Away, a recostumed past and escape that’s temporal locus is, ironically, the algorithm it tries to outrun.
