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: Continue reading →