For centuries, luxury fashion pushed the limits of wearability. Fussy styles and decadent details by famous designers were said to reflect wealth, extravagance and certainly status.
Fast-forward to 2020. Those almighty fashion houses still stand, but the look of luxury has taken a different course. Normcore is the name. Hardcore normal is the game. The term was first coined by K-Hole, a New York-based cultural reporting agency that suggested Millennials wanted to seek out individual identities by blending in versus undertaking the exhausting effort to stand out. Thus the “more-going-on-inside-than-meets-the-eye” look has become wildly popular.
According to Wikipedia: Normcore is a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious, normal-looking clothing. Normcore fashion includes jeans, t-shirts, sweats, button-downs, underpants, socks, and sneakers. Clothing is considered to be normcore when it is both cute and comfortable, and is viewed as ‘normal’ by all people. Try the trend with unassuming, chic pieces from Vince and AG Jeans.
The desire for high-end basics is definitely happening and it will likely continue for some time. Recently, Harvard researchers conducted an interesting study revealing customer behavior in luxury retail stores. They concluded that people shopping in tracksuits are actually perceived as more confident and likely to splurge than those waltzing through the doors in fancy clothes or otherwise contrived outfits. While we’re not advocating that the trend be taken to the tracksuit extreme, we must admit that unpretentious people dressed in simple, well-made attire seem to be the epitome of cool these days.
For surely, looking confident and appropriate while staying comfortable is a luxury in itself—and in a society that has become less formal, it makes perfect sense. Now that upscale brands like are presenting more relaxed, well-styled basics in luxury fabrics, it’s easier than ever to look great without trying too hard. In fact, you don’t need to flaunt a lot of details or patterns or status labels these days. The quality of these simple pieces is what stands out, and the less “branded” the look, the better. So who’s the new hero of high-fashion normcore? Might it not be the shleppy-looking fashion designer taking a bow at the end of his runway show?
