This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s fall editorial intern Celeste MacMurray. Find her on Instagram at @clsmsanchezx. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
If you’re familiar with maximalism, you’re sure to love clustering home decor. A continued celebration of the lived-in and cozy look, clustering or cluttercore is a style of home decor that combats minimalism. Instead of maintaining as little items as possible, clustering celebrates your mess and creates an environment that is truly all your own. Instead of advocating that your space needs to be clean at all times, you can let your mess sit a little and add to the tone of your home. The style aims to give your home a cozy look by utilizing all the clutter you’ve amassed. With clustering, gone are the spaces that hold no semblance of life and instead welcome raw, unfiltered representations of it.
For a clustering 101 class, this TikTok perfectly sums everything up.
The downside of overly clean and minimalist decor is how commercial it can look at times. It hardly ever looks touched or like anyone has ever stepped foot in these rooms. Sometimes they even look too uniform, and it’s almost as if they stay catalog ready even after someone has lived there.
Clustering encourages personalization and collecting to turn your home or apartment into a safe space just for you. Whenever you search through the tags for the clustering community, no two spaces ever look the same. They very clearly represent the person who curated them and showcases a piece of who they are to you. You get to see a piece of that person just by observing the way they decorate their home, and that’s a truly beautiful thing.
Here are two examples from two different people on TikTok, and although they both run in the clustering home decor spaces, look at how vastly different their styles are.
I think it’s endearing and rather telling how unique clustering is that two different people can showcase their tastes, aesthetics and personalities so freely just by the items they collect. It really presents to you the individuality of the space and its owner.
While researching the clustering home decor trend, I came across various tags that can be searched. There are many communities on apps like TikTok that celebrate clustering, give advice and even share inspo of what their homes look like. “#girlswhocluster” was one of the most common hashtags I came across, and it seems that some parts of the clustering community also run in similar circles as those into the coquette and fairycore aesthetics.
I found many TikToks showing the many uses of a dish or tray in clustering to hold various items, such as this one. A clutter tray is honestly a perfect idea for clustering because of the sense of ordered chaos it offers. It’s a little messy, but everything is in one place and the tray can be put anywhere you need it. You can even fill the tray with things you need, proving that clustering offers more than just aesthetics and can be used for practicality as well.
Some may dislike the idea of clustering because it could promote unrestricted consumerism, but there are ethical ways to do it. Those within the community promote thrifting and collecting your pieces over time, and I think that’s a great way to go about it. Buying your pieces slowly and building them up creates a thoughtfully curated air to the way your space is decorated. There’s no shame in purchasing and rehome secondhand pieces that have a little extra love. In fact, it adds a special flair to them. By doing this you won’t hurt your bank from buying too many items at once and the pieces you bring into your home will have a story to them. This advice is especially important if you have a love for vintage items and aesthetics.
If minimalism is more your thing, there’s no shame in that. Minimalism can also have its own cozy vibe, clustering just wants to achieve that a little differently. If you love collecting trinkets, keeping things with sentimental value like a crow or have a tendency to clutter things together, clustering home decor may be what you’ve been looking for. It’s the perfect balance between messy and artsy that offers a unique style. Most importantly, your space becomes an extension of yourself and represents who you are to guests. Don’t just live in your home, turn it into your own sanctuary. Lived-in, cozy and girl approved, clustering could become your newest obsession.
Have any clustering home decor tips? Share them with us and let us know how you create your best space!
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