normcore history lesson
Step inside my 2014 time machine...
Last night I tried to pioneer something I dubbed “bed beach,” wherein I laid in bed reading with the covers off, window open, trusty Lasko huffing away for a few hours as the sun went down. Breezy! Possibly this is also just “reading in bed” and not a real invention. That’s ok. Bed beach is in the eye of the beholder.
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If you were culturally sentient in 2014, you’ll remember (probably with a shudder) the frenzy that was the introduction of “normcore” into everyday parlance. For everyone else, normcore feels like some misshapen quality of the air, where we know it’s a thing and that it’s been a thing and we hear about it a lot and now everything’s something-core anyway, right? But no one’s otherwise properly sat us down to explain this amazing piece of cultural history. (My excuse is not that I was “too young” per se, but that I was still attending college in central Missouri, where driving to St. Louis to shop at Urban Outfitters was considered the height of lifestyle). So earlier in May, when SSENSE sent me out on a sort of ten-year-anniversary assignment to revisit normcore with its originators, it felt like a bit of micro-time-travel to a bygone era of internet discourse—a time when, if you can imagine it, naming a microtrend was still a novel conceptual exercise.
The resulting piece, Normcore Was Always A Misunderstood Fantasy, came out last Friday. It traces a rough history of how normcore bloomed from the brains of five young New York creatives who formed an art collective called “K-HOLE” and made “trend forecasting” reports (PDFs!) as a way of critiquing mid-2010s mass culture. Normcore, per their vision, was a pretty highbrow art kid idea related to ambiguity and code-switching. But then the term took on a life of its own, hugely thanks to (you can probably guess) a viral story in The Cut. (Note #1: Between that and the millennial pink story in 2016, The Cut has always been The Cut-ing). (Note #2: Fiona Duncan, the writer of that original normcore story, just released a full oral history of normcore with Interview today.)
In speaking with K-HOLE members Emily Segal, Dena Yago, and Greg Fong, I was struck not only by how undeniably cool and strange it must have been to be dicking around on a passion project with your other twenty-something friends, only to have it turn into a defining meme/touchpoint of a generation. What’s also sort of unbelievable is the relative personal anonymity the members kept for themselves (well, a fourth member, Sean Monahan, did try to make vibe shift a thing in 2022). I mentioned to Greg that, if they’d all done this as say, a modern-day Dimes Square squad, they probably couldn’t escape the IG it kid/TikTok personalities they would have had to become. (Note #3: Per Emily, Dimes Square in those days was horrifically branded as CHUMBO lol). (Note #4: You can see some of the original normcore PDF pages in that SSENSE piece, and all K-HOLE’s stuff is online still…….one can’t help but notice how perfectly they’d fit on an IG slideshow today…)
But also, these days, it’s hard to imagine something like normcore breaking out so explosively amidst our current landscape of perma-microtrend. As you’ll see in the piece, I kind of think that’s K-HOLE and normcore’s true legacy. It was always less about fashion than it was a perfect case study of 2010s culture: how a catchy neologism that defined some ineffable “aesthetic” got fed into the shiny, professionalized machines of digital media and social media machines and became an inescapable phenomenon. Something like normcore won’t happen again—at least not with this exact formula—despite how hard everyone on TikTok is trying. But when the next big one hits, one suspects that New York mag will somehow still be involved…
Extra-curricular Normcore Reading (honestly great to read just for the HEAVY nostalgic 2014 energy)
This is how VICE talked about normcore lol:
After what feels like an eon of street style, I’m starting to think that the new fetish object of 2014 is the normie … A tokenistic nod to the onion blossom tourists of Times Square won’t find artists new forms of beauty and truth. Because when your style icon is Larry David, but you’re a 22 year old video installation artist living in Bed-Stuy, what are you trying to achieve?
And this is how the NYT did it, what a blast from the past…
Jerry Seinfeld The white Nikes. The burgundy button-downs. It all adds up to the spiritual father of normcore … Are they ahead of him on the fashion curve? Hopelessly behind him? The first question is whether they are on their way to a job whipping up absinthe-infused cocktails at Freemans, or grilling bacon-Cheddar burgers at TGI Friday’s.
Please enjoy how the NYT and GQ were doing dictionary definition ledes in this era……what a time……you really don’t see much of that anymore because of the woke……). Also a highlight from GQ piece:
THE NORMCORE DUDE needs to call his dad … THE NORMAL CORPSMAN is his dad, and forgives him.
Proof that Lauren Sherman has always been Skeptical & On It!
Is Obama Too Normcore to Defeat Putin? (Gawker, obviously)