Indistinction

"Normcore is what happens after the final dregs of the punk negativity/self-fabrication process have been rinsed out x 1000, when the latest in diffuse negation coincides with a simple and unconscious affirmation. The short circuiting of pragmatism and style. The end of the Bourdieuan cycle of distinction, in that this valuable anti-value takes the form of the simply functional and (for the remaining middle) already valued.
[...]

"The dialectic of post-war fashion's expiration coincides with the end of the pseudo-conflict between left and right,...the establishment of a kind of homogenous naffness or continuum of the historically inert, a pan-reactionary politics. The truth as ever is out there, all over us. ...Normcore just is so now, so absolutely the state of things,...the undead parallel of all the other forms of indifference....Normcore is what the age demanded. One could go on indefinitely, indifferently. Writing this in a state of actually existing nausea, but in fact the 'writing down' of fashion, as of politics, is also emancipatory.[...]

"The end of dressing up - which has been announced before with the grunge moment in the pit of the precursor early 90s' recession, could also indicate the end of any necessary uniform for negation. A rampant negativity liberated from style;... why not the end of needing an outfit in which to revolt, along with the end of any specific party of revolt? What if revolt were to become as normal as normcore, the value form hipsters and the masses to merge in a post-middle of melée, a continuum of noes that melts the erstwhile poles (just as the poles are melting away and the year has become one universal season, a grey or green winter)? The end of the 'social critique and the aesthetic critique' as a simple real movement against everything existing is something everyone would look good in."

From "Notes on Normcore", recently posted at the Mute site, by contributor Benedict Seymour (written in response to a Thomas Frank article on the topic). Quite amusing in turns, but I think I find the original K-Hole "market report" on the supposed trend/not-trend much funnier. For instance...

I have a hard time imagining that someone wasn't trolling. After all: "K-Hole"? Right.