Just when I though that everything in fashion is already said and invented and that nothing can not surprise me anymore,something surprised me.Normal.Nowadays,in aspiration to be different somehow everyone become the same . After balancing in stilettos whose heels are reminiscent of skyscraper models,with strange installations on heads and combinations that include several completely incompatible patterns in the entire range of colours,street style reached critical level,and mania of celebrating dissimilarity became something completely opposite. Suddenly no one is interested.All those people that are “different” are somehow equally different. From obsession of individuals to define them selfs as different because they are wearing different clothes,entirely new phenomenon was born. Normcore. Normcore is unisex fashion trend characterised by average-looking clothes,movement that finds liberation from worlds obsession with appearance. Looking like a middle-aged dad with socks stretched to his knees,like that teacher from primary school that always wears worn out jeans or like mum when she goes to buy some groceries on Saturday morning in her casual edition,point of normcore dressing is in that you have to dress up simple and as more conventional as possible.You have to embrace sameness and let your personality shine instead your highly stylised outfit do that for you.
Trendsetters who recently wore branded clothes now buying their clothes from the shopping centres,and Isabell Marant sneakers were replaced by sport sandals we most often see on tourists.And everyone embraced this trend,from celebrities to fashion bloggers who had big impact on popularisation of this trend by wearing oversized coats and sneakers with everything. Although completely unpretentious,normcore already found its place in fashion magazines where editors describing it like “exhaustingly simple where you look like nothing”. Normcore is actually ideology of conformism,negation of all trends and opposite to hipster trend where everyone are trying to be special. The point is to blend in into the masses,look like everyone else but build your identity on some other grounds like wonderful personality,talents or charisma. Role models of this trend are for example Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs or Bob Saget…
Normcore is androgen style because there is no difference between mens and women clothes, colours are neutral and jeans and white shirts are must have pieces of clothes.Usually normcore fans are wearing Birkenstock orthopaedic shoes,New Balance sneakers,baseball caps and comfortable high waist straight jeans,sport socks or beanies.Basically you have to look like you are not putting any effort and that you do not really care about all that fashion around you.But here is the trap. In normcore there are again all sorts of “must haves”, “you have to do this- this can not” instructions and all that in order to faithfully follow this trend that is actually not trend but negation of all trends. They were making fun of people who were wearing trendy clothes but now they are those trendy people. Suddenly all street stye team that until recently were taking pictures in colour block combination, embraced this unpretentious, low-key look,not because they have suddenly converted to anti-consumerism but because now it is cool to be normcore. Actually you want to look trendy and you are juggling between several hours of grooming and aspiration to look like you just woke up or you did not want to waste your precious time to get ready. While hipster trend we can define like coming back to eighties,normcore is coming back to nineties.Under the banner of anti-fashion and beneath several layers of boring clothes hides an effort to be different from all those who wants to be different.Hipster trend under the mask.Even though they are saying they do not care they care a lot. And this is the thing I do not understand about normcore. And I do not think that fashion world really understood the message of this too so they started to make editorials with hashtag normcore even though Chanel coat on that page is everything but usual,conventional or normal. The fashion world interpreted normcore like minimalism and I think that is wrong.
Interesting thing is that this trend is not new.It exist for decades.It has always been a certain percentage of people in our society who wanted to go under the fashion radar because they did not care about that. This lack of interest in fashion did not ask for fashion name or to become trend. Normcore is something very common that we are selling under an innovative,something that never needed redefinition or even definition. Because those who did not care about how they look like still do not care,does not matter how we are going to call that .