Namecore is a stupid, made-up word which describes the trend of giving stupid, made-up names to stupid, made-up trends. It is, according to the hip magazine The Face, ‘the trend that unifies all trends’.
In the not-too-distant past, a trend would come along and stay around long enough for everyone to have some appreciable idea of what it entailed. Romanticism lingered for most of the 19th century. Punk defined the latter half of the 1970s.
In our restless century, trends such as ‘cottagecore’, ‘night luxe’ and ‘goblin mode’ will burn brightly on social media for a week or two and then disappear. You can find them on the ever-growing archive on the site Aesthetics Wiki, alongside such micro-phenomena as ‘health goth’, ‘seapunk’, ‘traumacore’ and ‘fairy grunge’.
‘Trends are being coined almost daily,’ said a marketing type interviewed in The Face. She ascribed this to our insatiable desire for ‘newness’, coupled with access ‘to a never-ending vault of nostalgia’ (ie the internet), as well as an innate human desire to label things.
Cottagecore, ‘the standout trend of 2020’ (according to Vox) is – or rather was – an aesthetic inspired by ‘idealised versions of the countryside’. Regencycore? That was inspired by the Netflix bodice-ripper Bridgerton: ‘So long #CottageCore cardis and flat caps: 2021 is all about feather trims and capped sleeves,’ announced Vogue last year.
But that’s all over now. After a ‘vibe shift’, we are into the era of ‘night luxe’, ‘indie sleaze’ and ‘rockstar girlfriend’. According to Seventeen, this is ‘the 21st- century embodiment of the hedonistic spirit’ and the antidote to the ‘That Girl’ trend of, ooh, eight seconds ago.
Fashion is following its own version of Moore’s Law. In 1965, the computer scientist Gordon Moore observed, quite accurately as it turned out, that computer-processing speeds double roughly every two years.
This has had its own effect on trend cycles. Everything sped up with text messages and email; then again with verbal platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. Now visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok allow incredibly niche things to reach a vast audience with terrifying speed.
Everything is happening all at once. We can’t process this much information! But we can orient ourselves with a few funny hashtags.
Still, if a trend gets 16 million views on TikTok and then vanishes without trace, is it really a trend? The baroque period lasted for about 150 years and bequeathed us cathedrals, sonatas, paintings. Will ‘vaporwave’, ‘dark academia’ and ‘warmcore’ leave us equivalent monuments? I venture to suggest they will not.
