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Normcore: how a spoof marketing term grew into a fashion phenomenon

The sad and sorry tale of normcore, 2014’s most forced of forced memes, actually begins in the summer of 2010 in downtown Manhattan, where five friends who had just graduated with arts degrees were making ends meet by working for marketing agencies.

In the course of that work, each of them had to sit through cultural trend forecasts, PDF or PowerPoint presentations juxtaposing cliched stock photography with Nathan Barley-ish neologisms predicting the future. Between their inward groans and suppressed giggles, the friends recognised something of great value, a familiar form no other artist had yet nicked. Meeting at their apartments after work, they took the idea and created an art project that took the form of a trend-prediction agency called K-Hole that used the forecast medium to present serious ideas.

They began publishing their own downloadable PDFs; gradually, galleries invited them to exhibit. In October 2013, for a group exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, they published a report called Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom, one chapter of which was entitled “Normcore”.

The report lay dormant for five months. However, unbeknown to the group, one of their flatmates had mentioned the term to a journalist friend. In February, Fiona Duncan wrote a piece for New York magazine claiming the term had been coined to signify a hipster trend for dressing “like tourists”, in white socks and trainers, stonewashed jeans and polo necks.

The story immediately set off a hilarious scrap among some young American journalists, with one, Christopher Glazek, publicly accusing Duncan of mistaking normcore (actually meant to be about people adopting identities to fit in with social groups) for “ActingBasic”, another idea in the report, to do with wearing non-designer-label clothes. Duncan apologised and blamed the New York editors: “I’ve felt an extraordinary amount of pain over this for the last few days,” she wrote on Facebook, four days after the piece was published. “My face broke out in eczema from the stress/frustration, seriously.”

The esoteric nature of the debate was soon lost when the international fashion pack, then travelling together on the autumn/winter show circuit, caught wind of the story during London fashion week. Plagued by editors hungry for trends and street-style stories, however, fashion journalists and bloggers quick off the mark applied it to a nascent trend among some stylists and designers for unostentatious, pared-back style – and a misappropriation was born.

Gap’s social media had already borrowed the term on 27 February (“We’ve been carrying your #normcore staples since 1969”, went one tweet). By 10 March, Vogue.com was asking: “What comes after normcore?””, before reviving it on 21 March, and then proclaiming Kate Middleton the “Duchess of normcore” in April.

Of course, no one, not even fashion journalists, ever seriously referred to themselves as “normcore”; at best, it was an ironic way of saying you weren’t getting dressed up. It soon became a term that could mean whatever you wanted it to, from “anti-fashion” to “wilfully anonymous”, but that didn’t stop journalists, academics and businesses from picking it up: as interest peaked in May and June, the beleaguered people at K-Hole were fielding up to 50 inquiries a week.

“We didn’t know whether to explain that what they were talking about wasn’t actually what we meant, or whether to just go with it,” explains Greg Fong, one of the five co-founders. “The brands were very interested in how we went viral, but we hadn’t actually sought that. It was a strange experience – I started to feel guilty about all the negative connotations it took on.”

Since the summer, the word has featured in a piece in the Lancet (the Lancet! The peer-reviewed Lancet!), been named by the Oxford University Press as a runner up to “vaping” for neologism of the year and come full-circle by being used as thinly concealed inspiration for Gap’s autumn “Dress Normal” ad campaign. K-Hole has been retained to consult at several tech and fashion companies.

Are there any lessons for them to learn? “Well,” says Fong, “I think it turned into a word people could use to discuss some social issues to do with our normative society and its discontents. But the other thing this all taught me is that the media is incredibly thirsty. For anything.”

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