Geologists are worried. So are strength trainers. Everything is suffixed with ‘core’ now. Mildly sad Tuesday? Mopecore. Accidentally wearing black and fur? Mob-wife core. Decluttering: Domestic goddess core. There’s Mermaidcore (aquatones, gleaming textures), Mumblecore (content about mundane life), Office-sirencore (we don’t know), even Tomatogirl core (ditto).
The descriptor has stretched across fashion, beauty, music, food and review chatter. So, guess what the tendency to christen everything as core is called? Corecore. And the exhaustion that follows? Corerot. It’s trend burnout, but with a trendy name.
Forget the geologists. Forget the strength trainers. Coremageddon (we invented this!) isn’t a bad thing. It’s not even new. Every generation has been devoted to their own trends – your grandpa probably grew up wearing bell-bottoms. Dad likely loved slimmer trousers. Mum probably had a bootcut phase. Big sister may have been partial to low-rise-corduroy. Every generation that comes of age is figuring out who they are. This generation is doing the same, but with better cameras and one handy term.
“A core is something you resonate with. It’s your opinion, your way of showing who you are,” says 23-year-old fashion designer Gunjal Goal (@GunjalGoal). She’s watched how niche subcultures are being celebrated in the mainstream and how stridently young people set boundaries. “Core culture is the digital-era update of the punk, goth, and emo movements of the past. But as people realise they can belong to more than one subculture, we have hybrid communities and groups.”
{{/usCountry}}“A core is something you resonate with. It’s your opinion, your way of showing who you are,” says 23-year-old fashion designer Gunjal Goal (@GunjalGoal). She’s watched how niche subcultures are being celebrated in the mainstream and how stridently young people set boundaries. “Core culture is the digital-era update of the punk, goth, and emo movements of the past. But as people realise they can belong to more than one subculture, we have hybrid communities and groups.”
{{/usCountry}}So, you can be cottage core for skincare, mermaid core on the weekend, normcore at the office, and care about your actual core at the gym. “This creates richer conversations, fresher ideologies, and a deeper sense of identity that doesn’t limit anyone to just one box,” says Goal.
Doesn’t this dilute the purity of being loyal to one movement or belief system? Take a deep breath and look around. Emo boys disappeared as they grew up. Goth girls got into soft-girl makeup. Heavy metal obsessives have outgrown their Metallica merch. Wikipedia has faithfully tracked the cores of our time. There are 300 entries and counting; it’s updated more religiously than most people’s LinkedIn profiles. But collectively, it just tells us that the kids are all right.
“In today’s world, each person is exposed to so many identities and options that it leaves them confused about their true identity and belonging,” says Goal. Picking a core then simply means you’re in life’s fitting room, figuring out what suits you best, for the moment.
Social media has had a major impact on the speed and intensity of the creation of these ‘cores’, but Goal says that this phenomenon would exist even without it. Look at your parents’ photo album of them in their teens and 20s. It’s not vintage-core; it’s just them being themselves before someone came and put a name to it.
“The term is so overused and it’s become a lazy way to market everything, it’s started losing its essence,” Goal points out. So, Corecore, as an idea, will die out. Who’ll pick up the pieces after the Coremageddon? Who knows? Why rush to predict it? If cores are how young people figure out who they are, isn’t that something to be celebrated rather than mocked? “As long as you’re not blindly falling for an idea, an aesthetic, a belief system, or a subculture, it calls for celebration,” she says. Remember that nuclear reactors have a core too – when the one at Chernobyl became unstable in 1986, it blew up!