It’s slowly becoming that time of year again. The leaves are starting to fall and the weather’s changing, you’re turning on the heating, lighting the fires, drinking your hot chocolate and Harry Potter is constantly on the TV.
As much as we love summer, we are glad when it comes to an end. No more beach-body diets or sunburns; instead we have oversized sweaters and bobble-hats. There is a sort of magic to the new season: the world outside turns red and orange and we huddle up in warm hats and jackets to go on cute café trips; all with the excitement of the Christmas period looming in the air. Days get shorter and before you know it, Christmas markets are starting to be put up.
Aside from all that, the world is undeniably beautiful in autumn. When the days are bright but cold, the air crisp and the floor covered in a carpet of golden brown leaves. The point of this article is by no means to deny autumn of its beauty but rather to question why we seem to have created a cult-like obsession with the season. Every season comes with beauty: think about early Spring when the sun warms up and teases out the tulips and daffodils, or the deepest depths of winter when your breath fogs up and the grass is covered in frost. And yet these seasons don’t appear to inspire quite the same universal hype. So, what I want to explore is where this obsession with autumn comes from and how it started.
As humans we love trends. We are animals of habit but it appears we are also born trend setters and followers, we love nothing more than adopting a new ‘thing’ and replacing it with something else a month later when it becomes old.
So, when did autumn become a trend? With the rise of TikTok and Instagram reels, the so-called ‘autumn aesthetic’ has flourished; lighting your pecan pie scented candle and posting about it is a must-do these days if you truly want to embrace the spirit of the season.
Speaking of trends, anyone remotely excited by fashion will have a field day once shops start releasing their autumn collections. The reason for this is that the season invites the purchase of endless assortments of scarves, hats, ear muffs and leg warmers to accessorize and elevate an outfit. In short, it seems there is a lot more you can do with fashion as the weather gets colder. You can get creative with layering clothes, pairing knitted turtle-neck dresses with various coats and boot lengths and playing with shades. Also, based on personal experience, people exude more confidence when snuggly tucked up in tights and sweaters, rather than squeezing into a skimpy two-piece swimsuit.
So, we love the fashion, we love the cosy aesthetic, but what else lies behind the hype? Perhaps we are all just a little tired of summer. Longer, warmer days come with an exhausting unspoken pressure to go out and be social to ‘make the most of the weather’. However, this pressure to constantly be around people subsides as it gets colder and we no longer need to come up with excuses to order a take-out and stay in. Indeed, as I thought about this more, I realised that a very likely answer to the question of the autumn hype is that human beings are simply lazy.
Adding to this, in a post pandemic world and with the ever-increasing rise of social media, people are becoming more introverted and isolated. We’ve become good at spending time alone, so much so that alone-time feels like the easier and more intuitive option. In contrast to summer, autumn, with its hot chocolates and movie nights, is a season that encourages this alone time. So, when autumn finally arrives, those first few nights of cosying up indoors feel like sitting down after a long day and breathing a deep, relaxing sigh.
As a season autumn has been endlessly romanticised. If you’re into novels, as I am, or have seen any movies set during this time of year you’ll be familiar with the picture painted of autumn: long, rosy-cheeked September walks in the golden sunshine with leaves crunching underfoot and pub dinners by the log fire. Well, without bursting our pumpkin-spiced bubble, I do wonder how much truth there is to this picture. After weeks of wind and rain here in Edinburgh, I have a runny nose and I feel fed up. I’m running out of chic-flicks to watch on Netflix and I don’t have a log fire, in fact I don’t even turn on the heating to keep the monthly bills low. Perhaps mentioning climate change here would be going too far, but it seems that, here at least, the change in seasons is not as drastic as it used to be and definitely not as drastic as books and films portray it. We had a rainy summer followed by a rainier autumn. So I dare to ask – is our obsession with autumn a desperate attempt to keep alive the magical, romanticised season magic we grew up with?
But it’s not just pop culture that is to blame for this. For a lot of us, when we think about autumn, we are filled with nostalgia for our childhoods of collecting conkers and painting faces onto fallen leaves. These childhood memories are deeply associated with autumn in our heads and it follows that our excitement about autumn is, at least in part, an excitement about something that is long in the past and that we won’t get back until we have our own children.
To conclude it’s clear that, whatever the reason, we just love to make things bigger than they are. All around the world, different cultures have taken something ordinary and created a festival to celebrate it. Those months between lying on the beach with a martini and putting presents under the tree would be endlessly long if autumn weren’t in itself an exciting occasion (and if you’re wondering why I don’t include Halloween, I think it only counts if you’re a little kid or a teenager who wants an excuse to get drunk, but for the rest of us, it is mostly negligible. So, in the spirit of controversy, I discount it for these purposes). So, perhaps by creating trends of drinking festive drinks and obsessing over the fashion, we are simply bridging a gap.
With that said, I hope everyone has a lovely autumn: embrace the coldness and the fashion. Go café-hopping, you might find a new favourite! And when the time is right, you can start listening to Michael Bublé.
Image Credits – Isabelle Brower