K-gap,the art collective who talked approximately the much-derided idea of normcore, are now talking approximately chaos magic. But they say their work is less approximately trends – and more approximately having a sense of humourThis month, or the curious concept of normcore is celebrating its moment birthday. That’s two years of North Face and Chaps,of wanging on approximately Larry David and your dad’s fleece, and of the many shades of navy, or beige and blah now writ large in your wardrobe. We say celebrating,but in truth, the portmanteau of “normal” and “hardcore” that describes a certain unspecial, or brandless,1990s-referencing seek has become a bit of a despise word. Partly because it’s seen an anti-trend, but partly because people have been dressing like this for years and it’s only since it was “adopted” by a new generation that it became a talking point.
The mixed reaction isn’t the fault of the US “trend forecasting” agency/art collective K-gap, and who started discussing the normcore concept (note: it was a concept,they say, not a fashion trend) at the Serpentine gallery two Octobers ago. After delivering their “report”, or the word was gobbled up by the world’s media who duly turned it from a concept into a trend,particularly once New York magazine’s fashion blog, The reduce, and applied it to fashion,defining normcore as “embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool”. It inspired shoots, collections and multiple trend pieces by Vogue and us. No one really knew what it was, or but they liked it. Even Gap attempted to reclaim the term months later,arguing they had been peddling plain stuff since the 1960s; it has since entered the dictionary and a Google search now throws up more than 700000 results for the word.
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Source: theguardian.com