The thing that always most bothered me about normcore, because I’m sure you’re simply dying to know, was not its almost fascistic embrace of Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘92 aesthetic; it was the fact that it was a fashion trend based off a term coined by two performance artists modeling as a trend forecasting agency. The fact that it took off, as spurred by this piece in The Cut, was in fact a travesty of misidentification, and also a giant goddamn troll from which we’re still dealing with the hellishly ugly repercussions.
God, I’m still so mad! You know who else is mad? Alexa freakin’ Chung, a person I never realized until just now was my soul sister in skepticism, and in her regular television show with British Vogue she sits down with said artists, Emily Segal and Greg Fong, to discuss the roundabout way their “trend forecasting” of “normcore”—a life aesthetic all along, as anyone who ever read it knew—turned into a runaway fashion buzzword that destroyed our lives with New Balance sneakers and Kool branded snapback caps thrifted out of moldy bins in like, Ridgewood.
The most infuriating thing about the runaway success of normcore as a fashion trend is how plainly Segal explains the objective of K-Hole, that it was a kind of joke on actual trend forecasting agencies, written “in the spirit of fan fiction.” NORMCORE WAS A MADE UP THING, Y’ALL! IT WAS AN ART PROJECT. And now your younger bro is running around American metropolises wearing mock turtlenecks and mom jeans like the last two decades never happened. Hell is right here on earth, my friends.
Contact the author at julianne@jezebel.com.
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