Literary style: Hamnet’s jerkins and capes herald ‘poetcore’ fashion trend

‘The fashion wears out more apparel than the man,” declared Conrad in Much Ado About Nothing, noting that dress trends are flightier than the natures of the people who wear them.

Its author William Shakespeare might particularly appreciate the latest fashion fad: dressing like a poet.

As Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film about the death of Shakespeare’s son, opens in cinemas this weekend, Paul Mescal, sporting an on-trend weathered leather jerkin is set to become the style muse of the moment, further growing the trend referred to on the internet as “poetcore”.

In the same week Jonathan Anderson, the chief designer at Dior, has opened a pop-up in Selfridges in London selling his accessories and clothes inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, famous for his Les Fleurs du Mal as well as his opium and laudanum habits. “Of this drab canvas we accept as life – it is because we are not bold enough!”, Baudelaire wrote in the preface to that work. The impoverished obviously hadn’t seen Anderson’s boldly-priced £2,650 book totes emblazoned with first edition covers and matching T-shirts. The pop-up rides on the coattails of Anderson’s debut menswear collection for Dior last summer, which featured neckties, blazers and the sort of cape worn by the poet Alfred Noyes’s famous highwayman.

We had all better cape up fast, for 2026 will be the year of the poet, according to the latest data from the social media platform Pinterest. In its annual trend forecast, it reported a 175% rise in its 600million monthly users searching for “the poet aesthetic”. Sydney Stanback, Pinterest’s global head of trends & insights, says one reason trends such as “poetcore” have grown in recent years is “the rise of ‘niche persona adoption’, where people use aesthetics as a shorthand for identity and lifestyle”.

“Poetcore draws from pre-internet-era literary aesthetics, including a romanticised ‘writerly’ persona, and blends classic references, quiet study rituals and a contemplative, creative lifestyle into a modern look,” she says. “We can expect to see gen Z and millennials channel their inner protagonist with oversized turtlenecks, vintage blazers, and messenger bags.”

Keen watchers of internet trends will also recognise the “poetcore” aesthetic as a more feminine evolution of the “dark academia” trend, which originated on the blog site Tumblr in mid-2010’s. Largely inspired by Donna Tart’s 1992 novel The Secret History, a murder mystery set at an elite New England college, the trend was rekindled on TikTok during the pandemic as gen-Z students were forced to learn from their bedrooms.

Although criticised for romanticising elite education and being dominated by white authors, the popularity of dark academia’s gothic, preppy imagery has persisted, with more than 688,000 posts now tagged with the trend on TikTok.

For Andrew McMillan, a n award-winning poet and professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, “anything that potentially brings more people to poetry, or brings poetry into more people’s consciousnesscan only be a good thing.” But, “perhaps it’s built on an archetypal imagined poet rather than the real thing”.

“As someone who’s always written with a chewed-up biro or whatever pen was most recently taken from a hotel desk, and scribbles in a notepad or scrap paper or on my phone, the great thing about poetry is that all it needs is the self, and for the self to be a part of the world; it doesn’t need a certain fountain pen, or a certain kind of notebook,” he explains.

For Jade Cuttle, The Observer’s poetry critic, poetry becoming a fashionable aesthetic is “amusing”. “We were rarely the cool kids at school. Though fashion itself is often deeply poetic,” she said.

Cuttle, nature poet whose debut collection will be published by Faber in 2027, believes the poet’s realistic aesthetic would be “strange and unsettling”. “My fashion line would involve slug dresses of self-foaming leather, grass shoulder pads and spiders’ thread.”

Photograph courtesy of Focus Features