On the Death of Subcultures

While late capitalism has ushered in an age of endless economic abundance for businesses, it has also made it nearly impossible for them to understand consumers. Algorithms give brands the ability to target their public with hyper-customized advertising. Social media has surfaced a myriad of once underground subcultures for public access. With these possibilities has come an age of hyper-subjectivity, where public interests multiply and shift so rapidly that businesses can no longer target a singular audience. A common belief is that late capitalism has necessitated the existence of trend-forecasting agencies to the extent that it has produced a multiplicity of subcultures and aesthetics which trend-forecasters alone can make sense of. One early proponent of this idea is Fredric Jameson, who articulated in his seminal work, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (28). This, he argues, creates a frantic and constant production of evermore novel goods at increasingly high turnover rates. Jameson’s opinion is the prevailing one: that culture influences economic production, or rather that culture and economy engage in a cyclical pattern of influence. A 2013 report by the now defunct trend-forecasting collective K-HOLE would solidify this idea for good.

In their report, Youth Mode , K-HOLE coined the term “Normcore,” which is defined as a mode of aestheticism that strives towards adaptability over exclusivity. The group describes Normcore as ‘non-deterministic,’ saying: “Normcore is the eyes of the Mona Lisa. This is the new world order of blankness” (Youth Mode 2013). Soon after its publication, the term slipped into the public vernacular and raised many questions about whether trend-forecasters have the ability to construct cultural trends rather than just predict them (Lemmey, “The Future is Not What it Used to Be”). It’s for this reason I argue that K-HOLE cemented trend-forecasting as the ultimate agent of late capitalist production. As Devon Powers suggests, “[trend forecasting] highlights the capacity of trends to collapse the distance between the past, present, and future by showcasing how the world of tomorrow exists today – even if its existence is secret from the mainstream” (204). So trend-forecasting is not an amalgamation of all cultures existing today. Instead, it magnifies a miniscule sentiment and projects it onto our future, regardless of whether the general public is on board. These magnifications, complement the ideals of neoliberal individualism because they ignore wider cultural patterns and groups, instead placing a greater emphasis on individual fulfillment and subjectification. The entire concept of ‘adaptability’ that’s central to Normcore is about the exponential proliferation and obsolescence of trends, rather than the end of them. Normcore is not so much a shift towards a trendless world, as it is a reaction to the total flattening of subcultural communities as we knew them.

Normcore made its debut in 2013 in a report called Youth Mode which was published by the New York-based trend forecasting agency and art collective, K-HOLE. After the text was first presented as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s “89plus Marathon” in October 2013 and subsequently published online, the term “Normcore” appeared in a highly contentious article by New York Magazine which referred to it as a set of basic styles adopted only by fashion-conscious youths. In another piece by The Cut, the author wrote, “in practice, the contemporary Normcore styles I’ve seen have their clear aesthetic precedent in the nineties” (The Cut). She goes on to liken the style to Kate Moss wearing Birkenstocks in the early 90s, in the vein of The Gap and Calvin Klein-esque 90s minimalism. Beginning in 2014, this misinterpretation gave way to a number of articles from other magazines and news outlets which would reiterate the original intentions of the term and then proceed to distort it anyway. One article from Salon dismissed it as a “trend among the privileged toward anti-fashion clothes of the kind available at Wal-Mart” (Frank, “Hipsters”). Another from Slate, said “Normcore is gray sweatpants pretending to be trousers. Normcore is a seen-better-days faun-colored golf knit. Normcore is an unlogo’d sneaker” (Doonan, “Beware of Normcore”). In the following months, more of the same would be uttered by writers from Elle, Vogue, The New York Times, The Guardian, Huffington Post —all of whom knowingly misconstrued the core message that K-HOLE put forth. In reality, this kind of Larry David fashion was more representative of another section of the Youth Mode report called “Acting”.

According to K-HOLE, Normcore is a mode of embracing sameness to combat the ongoing pressure of ‘being different’. In contrast to what the media assumed to be a clique of hipsters dressing in boring clothing to appear carefree, a concept more aligned with Acting Basic or “Mass Indie”, Normcore “knows the real feat is harnessing the potential for connection to spring up” ( Youth Mode 27). Normcore gives people the option to adapt to the norms of their surroundings. It emphasizes that there is no one “normal”, but rather that normality is a pluralized art form. The blatant misrepresentation of their work by media outlets drove members of K-HOLE to course-correct. A post on the collective’s Facebook page penned by L.A-based journalist Christopher Glazek read, “ Normcore means you pursue every activity like you're a fanatic of the form… It's about infinitely flexible, sunny appropriation” (Gordon “Everyone's getting normcore wrong”). The post chastised the media for whittling the concept down to a mere fashion trend, saying “– the point of Normcore is that you could dress like a NASCAR mascot for a big race and then switch to raver ware for a long druggy night at the club.” So Normcore isn’t as much a single, tacky trend as it is a cultural mood. Eventually the writer of the original New York Magazine article, Fiona Duncan, admitted that her article confused the meanings behind Normcore and Acting Basic. Yet, even with this correction, the term has persisted in the public vernacular as a bygone fashion trend, embodied by millennials who want to set themselves apart from the rest by wearing fashionably mundane clothes.

In his seminal essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson draws a correlation between the emergence of postmodernism and consumer capitalism. He expresses a great wariness of the rapid rhythm of fashion and styling, and the ways in which these ever-changing movements are designed to fade away. He calls this phenomenon “planned obsolescence,” which he perceives as the new type of consumerism. Linking the constant emergence and disappearance of cultural movements and objects to a greater social phenomenon, Jameson argues that late capitalism has engendered “the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve” (Consumer Society 11). This planned obsolescence ostensibly exists at the smaller levels of consumption. For example tech giants like Apple slow down their older products with constant software updates. This was so blatant that it led to a lawsuit by France’s Ministry of Economy and Finance in 2018 (BBC News). It exists in the realm of fashion, as the cheaply-made products produced by fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M have a short lifespan of their own due to the outsourcing of mass production (Forbes). But Jameson’s greater concern about society’s inability to retain its own history is brought to fruition by way of trend forecasting agencies. This is exemplified by the work of K-HOLE in particular.

In Youth Mode, the collective outlines three distinct attitudes emerging from the young people of 2013: Mass Indie, Acting Basic, and Normcore. In their description of Mass Indie, which is described as an equalizer between weirdness and normality, the group acknowledges that it is getting more difficult to stand out in a world where identities are sold to us so accessibly. They state, “Whether you’re soft grunge, pastel goth, or pale, you can shop at Forever 21” (Youth Mode 15). Thus, Mass Indie is a mode of mastering difference, to avoid the burnout of trying to keep up. Acting Basic, on the other hand, is a mastery of sameness, or a rejection of difference altogether. But this section is more cautious than the former. It warns that although Acting Basic may allow you to feel unencumbered by choice, choosing an unchanging style becomes burdensome when the styles inevitably change by the forces of capitalistic enterprise. Of this they suggest that “going back to basics doesn’t work when the scripts that determine the basics are out of whack” (Youth Mode 24). For K-HOLE, any sort of superficial simplicity under capitalism is just as exhausting and dangerous as trying to be different. Or rather, it is “just the denial of complexity, not its resolution” (Youth Mode 24). Lastly and most notably is their section on Normcore. This mode is one of belonging and finding connections by adapting to situations at hand.

On the surface, the report is rooted in aspirations of community. For example, the collective analogizes Mass Indie as a conversation about a dream you had last night, and Normcore as a conversation about the weather. They elaborate that both of these allow significant emotions to be revealed in a casual setting, but “no matter how vividly you describe it, your dream ends with you, while the coming storm affects us all” (Youth Mode 32). On first reading, they appear to suggest that Normcore is a trend towards the breakdown of exclusive differentiation and instead a communal embrace of difference. Yet this notion is contradicted by their opening statement: “Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities” (Youth Mode 27). In their emphasis on the idea that communities and identities are formed through individuals adapting to whatever situation is presented, K-HOLE presumes that no one can be born into a community and that a community cannot be grounds for self-actualization. This is the true subtext of Normcore: in late capitalist society, hyper-individualization makes it so that community is impermanent. Ultimately, this validates Jameson’s theory that consumer society obliterates the past with its constant production and erasure of trends. What you may find In the predictions of K-HOLE and the concerns of Jameson is that individuals have been uprooted from their origins to the extent that they must float between groups, interests, and identities ceaselessly.

In his essay, “So Now! On Normcore,” Rory Rowan finds clear flaws in K-HOLE’s underlying theory. He argues that Youth Mode has a startling “absence of any discussion of differences that take antagonistic form” (Rowan 11). Specifically, he finds K-HOLE’s report lacking in any meaningful discussion of political tension in our social systems. He posits that K-Hole presents an account of society where antagonism does not exist, “bar the minor frictions involved in the competition for social status or the boundaries of cliques – and even these can be soothed by empathy, Normcore’s primary affect” (Rowan 12). For Rowan, this indicates that K-HOLE simply waves away existing social norms and real problems in favour of a more idyllic version of the present. Still, he overlooks the many instances in the report where the collective acknowledges the social conditions that have led to the Normcore phenomenon. They actually begin the report by positing that it used to be possible to be special, but “the Internet and globalization fucked this up for everyone. In the same way that a video goes viral, so does potentially anything” (Youth Mode 4). Later they state, “Normcore knows your consumer choices are irrelevant, they’re just temporary” (Youth Mode 34). These statements indicate that K-HOLE is more aware of larger social issues at present than Rowan suggests.

While Normcore reflects the values of neoliberal hyper-individualism, this does not necessarily mean that K-HOLE advocates for it in their report. It would be more fruitful to ask the question of exactly who K-HOLE is writing their reports for. In a 2016 article for the Harvard Business Review , Vijay Govindarajan, a professor in Dartmouth’s Business School, advocated for a move towards “planned opportunism,” which he argued was the best way to take advantage of the “nonlinear” changes besieging contemporary firms (Powers 213). So the job of trend forecasting agencies is not only to provide an expertise on trends, “but also as the professional embodiment of planned opportunism. It is future uncertainty made into a business” (Powers 213). This planned opportunism capitalizes on the planned obsolescence of the market economy, normalizing its processes and consequences, and therefore necessitating the existence of trend forecasters. Even K-HOLE, who purportedly philosophized on the death of trends, are agents of this cycle. Rowan’s argument regarding K-HOLE’s neglection of the political and social antagonisms of its time can be explained by Devon Powers’ suggestion that forecasters take small fragments of the present, often from a select privileged group, and distribute it onto the future. In creating predictions for corporations, trend forecasting collectives are not meant to incite social change. Rather, they introduce a lucrative and promising vision of the future where large businesses will thrive.

In late capitalist society, the word trend has taken on a multifaceted, complex, and even divisive meaning. Consumer culture has fragmented identities, as new styles and subcultures emerge at rapid rates and disappear as quickly as they come. Late capitalism has not only cultivated an environment that requires trend forecasting agencies to make sense of the ever-changing cultural landscape. Indeed, trend forecasters are also primary agents of this consumer cycle. Even seemingly subversive trend forecasters like K-HOLE, who have been interpreted as making a trend out of trendlessness, reflect and acknowledge the exponential growth of styles, identities, and communities. Fredric Jameson predicted that late capitalism would create a perpetual present. Youth Mode makes this ever clearer. It captured the moment of 2013, where the social media and globalization created a world of hyper-subjectivity and individualism - the death of subculture, the death of community. Youth Mode acknowledges that identity and community are difficult to come by in this society, but it does not present an in-depth analysis or any call towards social change because it is merely a facet of the consumer system. In the end even Normcore, which presents a cautiously hopeful vision of the future, became a trend in itself.

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