America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
—Warren G. Harding, “A Return to Normalcy,” May 14, 1920
—Warren G. Harding, “A Return to Normalcy,” May 14, 1920
Not long ago, a curious fashion trend swept through New York City’s hipster preserves, from Bushwick to the Lower East Side. Once, well-heeled twentysomethings had roamed these streets in plaid button-downs and floral playsuits. Now, the reign of the aspiring lumberjacks and their mawkish mates was coming to an end. Windbreakers, baseball caps, and polar fleece appeared among the flannel. Cargo shorts and khakis were verboten no longer. Denim went from dark-rinse to light. Sandals were worn, and sometimes with socks. It was a blast of carefully modulated blandness—one that delighted some fashion types, appalled others, and ignited the critical passions of lifestyle journalists everywhere.
They called it Normcore. Across our Fashion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every possible meaning in the cool kids’ new fondness for dressing like middle-aged suburbanites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this an object lesson in the futility of ritually chasing down, and then repudiating, the coolness of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate prank designed to prove that style writers can be fooled into believing almost anything is trendy?
By March 2014, Vogue had declared Normcore totally over, but even that lofty fiat couldn’t put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slogan “dress normal” for its fall ad campaign, and the donnish Oxford English Dictionary nominated “normcore” for 2014’s word of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the decade’s most enduring trends.
More than that, elaborate prank or no, Normcore is a remarkably efficient summary of hipster posturing at its most baroque. Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized the endless, empty layers of fashion-based rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself to be so openly contemptuous of the working class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore thrives on appropriation. But where privileged hipsters once looked to underground subcultures—bikers, punks, Teddy Boys—as they pursued their downwardly mobile personal liberation, they now latch onto the faceless working majority: the Walmart shoppers, the suburban moms and dads.
Even if it began as something of a self-referential fashion joke, the media’s infatuation with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least, it highlights our abiding social need for a sanitized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G. Harding—the unheralded John the Baptist of the Normcore Gospel—famously called “a return to normalcy.”
The Revolt of the Mass Indie Überelite
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed for New York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:
Part of the problem derives from the hipster’s ubiquity. For the past several years, hipsterism has been an idée fixe in the popular press—coy cultural shorthand in the overlapping worlds of fashion, music, art, and literature for a kind of rebellion that doesn’t quite come off on its own steam. Forward-thinking middle-class youngsters used to strike fear in the hearts of the squares by flouting social norms—at least nominally, until they grew up and settled into their own appointed professional, middle-class destinies. Now, however, the hipster is a benign and well-worn figure of fun: a lumpenbourgeois urbanite perpetually in search of ways to display her difference from the masses.
They called it Normcore. Across our Fashion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every possible meaning in the cool kids’ new fondness for dressing like middle-aged suburbanites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this an object lesson in the futility of ritually chasing down, and then repudiating, the coolness of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate prank designed to prove that style writers can be fooled into believing almost anything is trendy?By March 2014, Vogue had declared Normcore totally over, but even that lofty fiat couldn’t put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slogan “dress normal” for its fall ad campaign, and the donnish Oxford English Dictionary nominated “normcore” for 2014’s word of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the decade’s most enduring trends.
More than that, elaborate prank or no, Normcore is a remarkably efficient summary of hipster posturing at its most baroque. Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized the endless, empty layers of fashion-based rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself to be so openly contemptuous of the working class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore thrives on appropriation. But where privileged hipsters once looked to underground subcultures—bikers, punks, Teddy Boys—as they pursued their downwardly mobile personal liberation, they now latch onto the faceless working majority: the Walmart shoppers, the suburban moms and dads.
Even if it began as something of a self-referential fashion joke, the media’s infatuation with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least, it highlights our abiding social need for a sanitized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G. Harding—the unheralded John the Baptist of the Normcore Gospel—famously called “a return to normalcy.”
The Revolt of the Mass Indie Überelite
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed for New York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:
Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”Brad, however eloquent and charming, did not coin the term himself. He got it from K-HOLE, a group of trend forecasters. To judge by K-HOLE’s name alone—a slang term for the woozy aftereffects of the animal tranquilizer and recreational drug ketamine—the group was more than happy to claim Normcore as its own licensed playground. As company principals patiently explained to the New York Times, their appropriation of the name of a toxic drug hangover was itself a sly commentary on the cultural logic of the corporate world’s frenetic cooptation of young people’s edgy habits. At a London art gallery in October 2013, in a paper titled “Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom,” team K-HOLE proposed the Twitter hashtag #Normcore as a rejoinder to such cooptation:
If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing. (It means being returned to your boring suburban roots, being turned back into a pumpkin, exposed as unexceptional.) Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the Mass Indie überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are.Jargon aside, the report had a point: lately “Mass Indie überelites”—a group more commonly known as hipsters—have been finding it increasingly difficult to express their individuality, the very thing that confers hipster cred.
Part of the problem derives from the hipster’s ubiquity. For the past several years, hipsterism has been an idée fixe in the popular press—coy cultural shorthand in the overlapping worlds of fashion, music, art, and literature for a kind of rebellion that doesn’t quite come off on its own steam. Forward-thinking middle-class youngsters used to strike fear in the hearts of the squares by flouting social norms—at least nominally, until they grew up and settled into their own appointed professional, middle-class destinies. Now, however, the hipster is a benign and well-worn figure of fun: a lumpenbourgeois urbanite perpetually in search of ways to display her difference from the masses.
by Eugenia Williamson, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Hollie Chastain
