The concept of naming small trends partially works.
The fashion industry frequently appropriates expressions to give names to trends and to all the details that have an impact on the message of shows that should be condensed in reviews that are more or less in-depth.The likelihood of encountering the phrase “core” these days is fairly high: regencycore, dude core, cottagecore, barbiecore, auntiecore are only a few nomenclatures developed on the fly to precisely identify stylistic trends or aesthetic typologies. Can the many -cores around truly put on a trend that can survive the speed at which views and hashtags disappear? Editors and editors abuse it, TikTokers are addicted to it, and the system suffers as a result.
The phrase normcore first appears in the pages of K-Hole in 2013, at a time when publishing was only starting to cope with digital, and that is how we currently think of the history of the suffix “-core.” The normcore is still more than just a trend that bases its visual narrative on the strength of uniformity, as New York Magazine succinctly put it: “fashion for those who understand they are one in 7 billion.”
Narrative that frequently falls short of its purpose since it lacks any tension that would reveal genuine shifts in how people viewed fashion. While these fads can be visually appealing, it’s important to consider why so much energy is put into giving them an uneven relevance. Journalist José Criales-Unzueta described microtrends as “a technique for writers and critics to make new collections and designer ideas more consumable or understandable to a wider audience” in an essay that appeared in i-D.
Tracing the prerequisites for a social as well as aesthetic phenomenon entails elevating a garment process to core, which meaning also carries the sense of a central nucleus. However, the main suffix typically ends with clothing, if not a specific garment detail. Unsurprisingly, the growth of the Internet’s hyper-specific aesthetics and the rise of micro-cores are related. In fact, a Wiki page detailing all imaginable online cores, such bubblegumbitchcore, cottagecore, and fairycore, exists. Balletcore, regencycore, and barbiecore were particularly relevant for popular culture this year.
Regencycore owes a lot to the Bridgerton series, but Barbiecore generated the most attention, reaching its peak on July 8 and showing a 93 percent rise in “Barbie pink” research, according to Depop, which was reported by Vogue. In reality, the popularity of pink and a doll-like attitude that resembles Barbie is only the end result of a longer and more gradual process. Pierpaolo Piccioli, one of today’s most influential designers, collaborated with Pantone to create an entire collection of Valentino dresses in a pink hue, and Balmain even had an idea for a Barbie collaboration earlier this year.But if there hadn’t been a widespread resurgence of the Y2K aesthetic, would the outfits in the Barbie movie have had the same media resonance—to the point that the suffix -core was uncomfortable? It’s lazy to explain and think about fashion by using the -core color. Publishing should endeavor to avoid a trend that tends to simplify and denigrate everything, assuming that this type of term can truly function on brief realities like TikTok. How and why the suffix -core frequently fails to take this into consideration.
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