I used to think cluttercore was just hoarding with better lighting.
Turns out, the aesthetic movement that’s been flooding Instagram feeds and TikTok for-you-pages since roughly 2019—give or take a few months depending on who you ask—represents something more complex than just piling stuff on shelves until it looks intentional. Cluttercore sits at this weird intersection of nostalgia, anti-minimalism rebellion, and what one design historian I spoke with called “visual abundance as emotional armor.” It’s maximalism, sure, but it’s maximalism with a specific kind of chaos baked in. The shelves aren’t just full; they’re overfull. The walls aren’t just decorated; they’re colonized by overlapping frames, dried flowers, vintage finds, and objects that may or may not have actual meaning but definitely have presence. It’s the design equivalent of wearing all your favorite jewelry at once because why should you have to choose?
The Psychology Behind Loving Every Surface Covered in Stuff
Here’s the thing: cluttercore emerged as a direct response to the tyranny of minimalism. For years, we were told that clean lines and empty countertops equaled mental clarity and good taste. Marie Kondo became a verb. Neutrals dominated. And a lot of people—myself included, honestly—started feeling like their homes were supposed to look like nobody actually lived there. Cluttercore says screw that, basically. It reclaims mess as legitimate aesthetic choice rather than failure of discipline.
Research from environmental psychology suggests that personalized, object-rich environments can actually reduce stress for some personality types, particularly those high in openness to experience.
The visual density activates different neural pathways than sparse environments do. Where minimalism aims to calm through emptiness, cluttercore stimulates through abundance—and for certain brains, that stimulation feels like home rather than overwhelm. I guess it makes sense when you think about how different people’s apartments made you feel in college. Some friends had those pristine spaces that felt like showrooms, and you were afraid to put your bag down. Others had every surface covered in books and plants and weird thrift store finds, and you immediately wanted to stay for hours.
When Collections Become Curation (Or At Least That’s What We Tell Ourselves)
Wait—maybe curation is the wrong word entirely.
Cluttercore operates under different rules than traditional interior design, where every object justifies its placement through some invisible calculus of balance and proportion. In cluttercore spaces, the logic is more associative, almost collage-like. That vintage tin sits next to your grandmother’s teacup because both have a certain patina, a certain weight of time. The dried flowers crowd against the stacked books because verticals need to be broken up with organic shapes—or maybe just because you liked how it looked when you set them down and never moved them. There’s intentionality here, but it’s intuitive rather than systematic. The maximalist designers doing this well aren’t following rules; they’re following feeling, which is both the appeal and the risk.
Some cluttercore spaces cross the line into genuinely dysfunctional visual noise.
The Dark Side of Aesthetic Accumulation and When More Becomes Meaningless
I’ve seen cluttercore spaces that feel alive with personality and others that just feel… suffocating. The difference seems to come down to whether the abundance serves the person or the aesthetic. When you’re adding objects because they genuinely resonate with you—because that weird ceramic frog makes you smile every time you see it—the clutter reads as authentic. When you’re adding stuff because the algorithim told you that cluttercore is trending and you need more “visual interest,” it shows. The objects become set dressing rather than autobiography. There’s also the practical concern that gets less attention in the design press: cluttercore is high-maintenance. All those surfaces need dusting. All those objects need organizing enough that you can still find things. All that visual complexity requires ongoing curation or it slides from intentional chaos into just… chaos.
Honestly, I think that’s why cluttercore won’t fully replace minimalism for most people. It demands too much—too much maintenance, too much decision-making about what stays and what goes, too much emotional energy invested in objects.
But for those it works for? It offers something minimalism never could: the permission to be visibly, messily human in your own space. To let your environment reflect not the person you’re trying to become through discipline and restraint, but the person you already are, with all your contradictory tastes and irrational attachments and inability to throw away that concert ticket from 2015. Cluttercore says your mess—if it’s your mess, chosen and arranged and lived with—can be beautiful. That’s either liberating or exhausting depending on your nervous system, I guess.
