It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it... See more

The digital obsession with cores—used as a suffix that basically denotes a kind of style—began back in 2013, when the term normcore was first coined by trend forecasters K-Hole as a philosophy of fashion. They posited that the chronically online were competing for virality and uniqueness, and as a result, both were harder to come by. Enter... See more