Oops, I Accidentally Invented Normcore

Ryan Estrada — Oops, I Accidentally Invented Normcore

So, now, without further ado, let’s welcome our tenth storyteller, Ryan! Okay. I’ve never really considered myself a style icon. In fact, back when I was a kid, there were some very basic, uncreative bullies who told me that if I were to look in the dictionary under unfashionable, I’d see myself. They were the ones with the basic jokes. I just had the basic clothes. But I do have an excuse for why I look like this. I’m a cartoonist. I spend most of my time sitting alone in a room staring at a desk. So I just wear like, this is the clothes that I have. And when I go out of the house, I still look like this. Which made it really, I had this really weird day back in 2016. It was the day before my 36th, or my, how old was I?

I don’t know. I was getting old. And so I log into my computer and I see all of these alerts coming. I’m like, oh, that’s nice. My friends are wishing me a happy birthday. They were not. Instead, it was a lot of people talking about my fashion. So I’m like, great, I’m already feeling old and uncool, and now you’re gonna make fun of my clothes? But these were not my friends. These were complete strangers talking about the fashion trend that I invented and apparently did not know existed. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I scroll up, and they’re all replying to a link to the dictionary. I click it, and I see immediately a photo of the exact outfit that I was wearing next to a headline that says, Normcore, named… Runner up for word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary.

I’m like, what the hell is normcore? Luckily I’m in the dictionary. So I scroll down. Noun, a style in which you wear purposely unfashionable clothes to make a point. A couple clicks later and I see created by cartoonist Ryan Estrada. I haven’t left my house in a month. How do these people know how I’m dressing? It took some investigation work to figure out what was going on here. Apparently, a couple years before that, I’d had this ridiculous deadline where I had to make 100 comics in a month. I don’t know if anyone here makes comics. 100 comics is a lot of comics to make in a month. You go a little crazy. You don’t sleep. And I was writing and illustrating comics that I had completely forgotten existed by the time I clicked send on the email. One of them was apparently making fun of fashion trends. in which I made up a bunch of completely ridiculous trends, and the punchline, the last panel, was the stupidest fashion trend that my sleep-deprived brain could think of, normcore, which I defined as wearing only completely ordinary clothes and only using slang after it had appeared in a sitcom.

Unbeknownst to me, a couple months after that, someone added my definition to Urban Dictionary. Apparently, there’s a… trend forecasting firm, and also apparently there’s such a thing as a trend forecasting firm, that saw this on Urban Dictionary and wrote a piece about how normcore was the next big thing. Which led to every single trend-setting magazine, blog, newspaper, writing articles about how normcore was the stupidest thing in the world. I do not read any trend-setting magazines because apparently I’m normcore. So I knew none of this was happening until it was nominated for Word of the Year. Once I found that out, it was everywhere. GQ referred to it as a stupid trend made up by idiots. Which I was kind of offended by. It’s a stupid trend made by unidiot. Singular.

But I saw it on billboards. I saw it in the windows of department stores. I saw it on a Play-Doh commercial. The cast of Avengers were jokingly calling Hawkeye Normcore in interviews. And finally, two of my favorite TV characters, Rosa Diaz and Ron Swanson, were expressed disgust at the word Normcore on their respective sitcoms. The word Normcore was now Normcore enough to be Normcore. So yeah, high school bullies, sure, you were right in addition to being basic. If you look up unfashionable in the dictionary, you will see me. But apparently, I’m so good at being unfashionable that I’m kind of a style icon. Let’s keep it going!