‘It’s fun. It can be camp and it can be macho and it can be sexy as well.’ Lime bike jousting at London Fields in east London last week. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA View image in fullscreen ‘It’s fun. It can be camp and it can be macho and it can be sexy as well.’ Lime bike jousting at London Fields in east London last week. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA Culture Lime bike jousts? Why youth culture is embracing the medieval era From chainmail-wearing pop stars to high-fashion catwalks, the spirit of the middle ages is erupting into the zeitgeist
Ellie Violet Bramley Sat 24 Oct 2026 13.00 CEST Last modified on Sat 24 Oct 2026 19.06 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google M edieval knights used to joust on warhorses with wooden lances, but this week in east London , two men jousted on Lime bikes with PVC pipes. This contemporary spin on a medieval spectacle is just one example of the spirit of the middle ages erupting into the zeitgeist.
As part of Frieze art fair, the artist Corbin Shaw staged a show called Feast of Fools. The “‘anti-Frieze” Frieze show took inspiration from a medieval festival where, as Shaw put it to GQ , “the peasant class could insult the rich”. In the video for Troye Sivan’s latest song, Party, the Australian pop star postures as a medieval knight.
View image in fullscreen A model wears chainmail at the Chopova Lowena spring/summer 2026 fashion show in London. Photograph: Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho/Getty On catwalks at Givenchy, Louis Vuitton and Max Mara , from wimples to chainmail, it’s been called “medievalcore”. In the new film The Uprising, actor Andrew Garfield has been leading the rabble in Paul Greengrass’s retelling of the Peasants’ Revolt. Sports Banger, the political collective that makes punchy T-shirts, has offerings that read: “ Peasants’ Revolt 1381. Let’s finish the job ”.
Why is the medieval era being mined by contemporary culture? Simon Trafford, a senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of London Institute of Historical Research, says “it’s always there”, but it’s more “a matter of which particular bit of it we decide to borrow from at any one time”.
View image in fullscreen The Lime bike joust was geared towards accessibility in the week the ‘expensive and inaccessible’ Frieze art fair took place. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA “Some of the way modern artists and fashion designers are using the medieval is focused on joy and playfulness,” says Marion Turner, a professor of English literature and language at the University of Oxford. They’re not, she adds, “saying: ‘This is what I actually think the medieval world was like.’”
Bridget Dalton, a semiotician and cultural analyst at Truth Consulting, says: “It’s fun. It can be camp and it can be macho and it can be sexy as well.” In the video for Party, a victorious, post-battle Sivan gallops to celebrate with a hedonistic, homoerotic knees-up in a castle. In one piece of choreography, Sivan is used like a battering ram.
Dalton describes another emerging medieval strand as “wenchcore”, which offers “a more acceptable voracious sexuality, the ribald, singing, dancing, drinking, doesn’t-need-to-be-perfect idea of womanhood and of masculinity … more of just whatever goes”. It could be seen as the perfect, medieval-inflected answer to Brat. The middle ages, says Trafford, “gives us a sort of fantasy other space”.
View image in fullscreen The Australian pop star Troye Sivan poses as a medieval knight in a music video for his song Party. Ph…