Why Normcore Is The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything

The fact is, we’re over it.

In the dawn of our adulthood, amid war, natural disasters, bio disasters, and the threat of rising global temperatures, we’ve found ourselves phenomena of study and a steady stream of verbal flogging for the generationally righteous.

We’ve Facebooked and Tweeted our way through decades of cultural resurgences to last us lifetimes. Our modern narcissism and sext tableaus arise in tandem with our ever-fading 10-second photos. We’re broke sellouts standing for nothing but ourselves. We’re all thumbs-up for activism we can watch. We fill our hours reading up on inspiration. We’re gay, loud and proud in a digital cloud; we’re sick of paying to be sick; and feminism, because 77 cents to the dollar, damn it.

We’re all hipster-hating hipsters: counterculture is out of our grasp, because no matter what we do, all we can be is meta. Humanity has done it all before.

Our world looks like Tim Burton’s brainchild. It’s no wonder we flock to so many iterations of Woodstock, and inevitable that Molly is such a popular “friend.” All we want is a sense of distraction and lightheartedness — and we’re lab rats trying to engineer our next fix of dopamine.

Enter anti-creativity. Living by tropes, speaking in platitudes. The freedom to hide behind the guise of the unremarkable until we figure out our place in this world. We really don’t have time to think about creativity – as we stepped off campus cliffs into a world of global economic duress and digital dating, we’re drowning in the basement of Maslow’s pyramid. It’s nice just to rest for a while, because we’re just past that threshold of weary.

Sometimes, we don’t even want to so much as THINK about how to look like a street fashion minx or dapper dude on a daily basis– all we want is a uniform we can stick to now with nary a care. This is why Normcore is so brilliant: it’s the sphere in which we can show up to our low-paying jobs in sneaks, jeans, and free t-shirts, and still be part of a trend that now has a name.

Normcore is the warm apple pie a la mode of the fashion world. It’s dowdy and it makes you feel fat, but you’re so comforted it ceases to matter. At least it makes Goodwill a place you can actually shop at without feeling completely overwhelmed by the need to sieve and edit. Pretty is as pretty does, and pretty does a fat lot of f**k-all.

One day, we might just find ourselves in an exalted land full of Manolos and Ferragamos; until then, all we can do is put one shower-slippered and besocked foot in front of the other.