From fashion to art, we're going medieval in 2025

It's a trend that's been bubbling a while now, like a cauldron of scalding oil in a castle siege. The middle ages, or at least our fantasies of medieval Europe, have already stormed the gates of our collective imagination and will only continue to influence culture in the year to come. In the 2025 CBC Arts Trend Forecast, artists from around the country shared their predictions for the next 12 months of arts and entertainment, and their feedback was clear. Yea, verily. We're entering the dark ages once more — in terms of our tastes, at least.  

The nostalgia cycle rarely rewinds this far. Fifteen years, sure — not 1,500. And yet, the signs are all there. During the plague years of the pandemic, medieval gimmicks were on the rise. On social, bardcore was an early COVID craze: pop bangers re-arranged for lutes and flutes. In 2021, Cardi B was Instagramming herself in a pair of golden boots — thigh-high Balenciagas that would make a knight of the round wince with envy. In Saltburn (2023), the film's opening titles burnished with medieval flare: a gothic typeface gilt by hand. 

Right this moment, a Knightcore TikTok might be casually drawing millions of views; or maybe videos from a Fashion Institute of Technology student, famous for wearing full armour to class, keep appearing on your For You Page.  In pop culture, "going medieval" looks like Florence Pugh in Dune: Part Two, draped in a chainmail gown with matching veil, or her co-star Zendaya, turning up at the film's April premiere in chrome couture, a suit of retrofuturistic armour pulled from the Thierry Mugler archive. And then there's Chappell Roan, perhaps the greatest harbinger of a pre-renaissance revival. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September, where the pop star was dubbed best new artist, Roan was in LARP mode the entire show. 

Historically accurate? Nay!

Madeleine LeBrun, a Toronto-based illustrator and contributor to the CBC Arts Trend Forecast, predicts our fascination with medieval vibes will only grow stronger in the new year, but as she's observed, our tastes play fast and loose with history. In Europe, the middle ages extended from the fourth to 16th century, but today, Game of Thrones and Shrek raves have as much of an esthetic influence as the Bayeux Tapestry.

LeBrun is especially interested in how historical motifs, like the illustrations you'd find in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, are often spliced with imagery more reminiscent of fantasy role-playing games, anime or "tribal tattoos from the '90s." 

She has been seeing medieval flourishes pop up in the work of contemporary artists and designers she follows. She cites a Montreal-based jeweller that recently caught her attention: they go by the name Pearlescent Troubadour on Instagram. ("It has kind of a chainmail look," says LeBrun.) She's also been intrigued by the work of another Canadian artist, Anjali Kasturi, who often employs stained glass. 

She's an admirer of Benjamin Lederach Styer's paintings, and the mixed-media works of American artist Chris Lloyd, whose fearsome canvases contain references to both contemporary Christian memes and medieval representations of hellfire and demons. LeBrun can't explain why she's observing the same "cyber medieval sort of look" across multiple disciplines. "But I don't think it's a coincidence," she says.

Fie upon thee, big tech! 

"The pace of life is so fast now," says LeBrun. "Everything is supposed to be so clean and efficient." And for the last decade, if not longer, a modern and minimalistic esthetic has reigned, like a sleek visual expression of our faith in tech. But LeBrun thinks the public's interest has started to fade. People are becoming more interested in maximalist detail and hand-wrought ornamentation, she says. Maybe it's just the natural swing of the pendulum, but she suspects it points to something deeper, and she wonders if it's a sign we're yearning to unplug — fed up with the failed promise of a digitally connected world.

"There's a desire to go back to a more handmade, traditional way of doing things, because it allows you to slow down," says LeBrun. "Whether in your art practice, or your life, I think you can only go so fast for so long, you know?"

"When you become kind of pessimistic about the future, it's natural for your thoughts to turn to the past. And I don't think that is a bad thing," says LeBrun, who notes how medieval influence crept into the fashion and design of the '60s and '70s too, another era marked by enormous social change. "I think it's kind of cyclical," she says. Tired of hustling, people want to return to a simpler era — a period that suggests something bucolic and romantic.

Varvara Nedilska is a Toronto-based artist and graphic designer who graduated from OCAD University's illustration program in 2020. Her thesis project, Cyberfolk, tapped into a similar idea, depicting "a futuristic environment oversaturated with technology" where people "reflect their desire for a return to an ancient way of life." The imagery in that series pulled inspiration from fairy tales and the look of illuminated manuscripts, two influences which continue to inform Nedilska's work. 

"Younger people, they daydream about a simpler time," says the artist, who's 27. "We're all very hopelessly addicted to technology, but also really distrustful of it, and not really happy about the direction things are going," she says, pointing to examples like AI image generators. "I think that medieval fantasy stuff kind of helps in that regard," she says. "[We're] trying to fantasize about a time, a pre-technological kind of time." 

But what sort of world are we actually imagining when we dream of composing Gregorian bangers on the EP-1320 Medieval sound sampler, or search "chainmail necklace" on Pinterest (a keyword that saw 45 per cent growth between Sept. 2022 and August 2024, as it happens).

A quest for meaning in a chaotic time

Montreal artist Maria Simmons doesn't read the medieval trend as purely escapist. She mentions the era's influence on current fashion, like Chappell Roan's battle-ready VMA wardrobe. "You know, you're not just hanging out wearing chainmail," Simmons laughs. "[There's] a purpose and job associated with that, at least in the past," says the artist. "[It] probably imbues whoever is wearing it with this casual sense of purpose. … It feels meaningful."

For Nedilska, the visual language of picture-book fairy tales — a "medieval era kind of world" — has been an effective tool for crafting her own stories. For her Cyberfolk series, Nedilska conjured fables about modern anxieties such as facial-recognition technology and the cult of self-improvement. 

Medieval-inspired scenes can feel comforting and inviting to the viewer, says the artist. (Are these half-remembered characters from a dog-eared childhood storybook?) Nedilska also says she's often inspired by the surreal quality of medieval art, especially the illustrations in manuscripts. The pictures feel familiar to her, but also deeply strange, "like relics of an almost completely different culture," she says, and she loves the era's no-rules approach to perspective. In terms of scale — and subject matter — anything goes. Painting in a medieval style allows for limitless creative potential, she finds. And there's also this: "it does make you feel connected to history."

How to close an epic generation gap

Simon Petepiece has experienced something similar. The Montreal-based artist is known for working with the sort of building supplies you'd find at the hardware store. Steel studs, for example, are metal beams used in drywall framing, but Petepiece shapes the thin strips into sculptures — forms resembling the rose windows and ornate spires of a cathedral. He got the idea while experimenting with the material. When bent, the steel develops beautiful scalloped edges — "like sculpted stone," he says. The look reminded him of Gothic architecture, and so, Petepiece threw himself into researching medieval history. While reading, he discovered he felt a kinship with artists of the era. Petepiece is trained as an architect. "In this time period, a lot of the artistic disciplines weren't even considered separate," he says. "I think that spoke to me."

When Vanessa Brown visits a museum, she searches for a similar feeling of connection, and she often discovers it in the medieval wing. Originally from B.C., the artist now splits her time between Brussels, Luxembourg and Vancouver. "If I go to the Cluny," Brown says, referring to the famed museum of medieval art in Paris, "I'm looking at paintings a lot of the time, but I'm also really interested in the sculpture as well as the material culture … how a knife was made, or a buckle, or a sock or anything." 

"I like — in my own work — to leave the trace of my hand," says Brown, and when she looks at an object from the middle ages, those tell-tale signs are obvious. "Like, 'Ah! Someone forged that sword,'" says Brown. Every mark and detail is unique. "There's the trace of the human in there," says Brown. "I think that I really connect with that."  And it's a concept she explores in her own art practice. Brown's work has sometimes referenced medieval Christian reliquaries — "this idea that the spirit of the person is in the object." And she's awed by the power medieval art and artifacts still have in the present day. However strange or unfamiliar an item may be, you can still imagine the personality of its maker — and that even applies to the stuff you keep seeing on Instagram.

The timeless appeal of weird little guys

Medieval marginalia, the doodles in the margins of old books and manuscripts, have proved infinitely meme-able. Cranky dragons, warring snails and an abundance of derpy beasts were  sketched into existence by some ancient scribe, and are still being shared on social media today. Artists Tine DeRuiter and Laura Venditti can't get enough. Venditti is an animator from Montreal, and she's taken the memes to another level. Last month, she released a short film on Instagram — a project she plans to expand on. It stars a cast of needle-felt kitties — stone-faced abominations, all based on the critters she'd seen in historical memes. "Every time I saw these weird paintings, it really made me laugh," says Venditti, and she thinks the source material has found an audience online simply because the drawings are flush with personality. "You see their faces; they're really alive or charismatic," she says.

DeRuiter, who's based in Brampton, Ont., is a ceramicist, and she's been painting Monty Python-esque scenes on plates, mugs and candlesticks for the last three years. Like Vendetti, her fixation began with the memes — "all the weird-looking cats that look like humans," etc. Now, she mines images from the British Reference Library for inspiration. "When I used to picture the medieval times, it was always serious," says DeRuiter — death and disease and despair. "But there's so much weird, fun stuff going on in the art," she says. "Like farting monkeys or nuns picking penises off trees. … It seems like they had fun with it, too."

"It's like they were just like us," says LeBrun, talking about medieval marginalia. "They were goofing off and drawing these things just to be silly." 

"There's something really satisfying about identifying something in history, especially the distant past — like the middle ages — that is accessible and kind of relatable to us now," she says. The people back then lived through times of plague, misinformation, war and massive social upheaval. (Again, just like us.) But there's light to be found in the dark ages — which might be yet another reason we're intrigued by the era. Maybe humanity will make it through this round too. After all, says LeBrun, "we're still here."