I probably already missed the boat on normcore as an actual cultural phenomenon, style, or whatever, because (a) I seem to always be a few weeks, months, or years behind these things, and (b) even if I did hear about it at the right time, I wouldn’t care. (I have been told that my overt lack of caring about these things makes me even worse than the people who actively follow these things, but whatever.)

As near as I can tell, New York Magazine reported on the trend of people wearing clothes that make them obviously unobvious (that’s my description and no one is allowed to use it!), which someone somewhere apparently called normcore, and because anything that anyone wears in New York is destined to become a trend somewhere else, “normcore” was born. (Actually, the term dates all the way back to October 2013, when something called a “trend forecasting group” first used it. Here’s a PDF file the group put out that I’d prefer not to read. I’d like to think that a shipment of radioactive L.L. Bean shirts was somehow involved in the genesis of normcore, but I doubt it.) Soon, HuffPo chimed in on normcore, Know Your Meme got an entry, and Vogue ripped on the trend. In the UK, the Guardian reported on it in an effort to look cool, and the Telegraph declared Barack Obama to be “normcore’s latest poster boy.” First of all, I don’t know if they meant that as a good thing (the hip president), a bad thing (“normcore” is the new “mom jeans”), or just a British thing; and I don’t know if normcore had any previous poster boys that would let Obama be the “latest” one.

Before most of these stories even made print, Mashable was reporting on how the internet was getting sick of normcore. It barely took two weeks after the New York Magazine article before Esquire was lecturing people on how they just. don’t. get. normcore:

Normcore is a fashion trend, pure and simple, and like most fashion trends it’s a riposte to the styles that came before it. In this case, normcore is flipping the bird to hipsters, with their entrenched slim, dark denim infatuation and rocker affectations. Normcore instead draws on hipster kryptonite, like technical outdoor gear, prep school hippy Birkenstocks, and substitute teacher-style denim, to achieve a subversive look detectable only to those in the know.

At this point, I’m quite confident that I am not “in the know,” and I have my doubts that “normcore” has ever really existed outside the immediate circles of a few breathless fashion and society reporters. Here’s the thing, though: If normcore exists anywhere, I’m pretty sure that I am normcore, and have been for some time—like, my entire adult life. I buy most of my clothes at Target. I own one non-trucker baseball cap that I wear in an unironic fashion, typically to prevent sunburn on my bald pate. I’m having a hard time coming up with further ways to describe how I dress because I just don’t think about it that much. I’m such an anti-hipster that I come off sounding like a hipster. Touché, inner monologue.

My only real point is this: it feels pretty good to finally be cool through no effort whatsoever on my part, even if only for a brief, possibly-already-over moment. I’m okay with going back to not being cool. And I’m sure as hell never wearing a monocle.

Photo credit: Igor Schwarzmann [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.