Post Luxury: Normcore as Node and Prism

'Normcore' was not only the most Googled fashion trend of 2014 but also the runner-up for neologism of the year by Oxford University Press. The phrase generated numerous headlines, such as "Normcore Is (or Is It?) a Fashion Trend (or Non-Trend or Anti-Trend)" in the Los Angeles Times in 2015 or "Everyone's Getting Normcore Wrong, Says Its Inventors" in Dazed in 2014, indicating a multi-faceted and intriguing phenomenon. This article employs the timing of post peak normcore to investigate a trend that surely entailed more than meets the eye. Described as "a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious, normal-looking clothing" by Wikipedia, normcore was in fact not meant to be a trend at all, nor was it meant to be used to refer to a particular code of dress. Initially a spoof marketing term coined by the art collective/trend forecasting group K-Hole in 2013, normcore was originally a subversive concept, anticipating an alternative way forward, proposing anti-distinction as the radical new, analysed here as a mode beyond luxury—as 'post luxury'. Combining anthropology, consumption theory, and critical fashion theory with a practice-based insight informed by the author's background in trend analysis and brand planning as well as the art school context, this article attempts to frame and unpack normcore in order to speculate about the future of luxury.