Much is written about how young people no longer form real-world communities. Well, fashion trends are a stark rejoinder to that
Wake up babe, a new trend just dropped.
According to the website Know Your Meme, it’s been five years since the “wake up babe” format – which sees the phrase pasted over an image of a man waking up his girlfriend to announce a new internet talking point – really took off. I first encountered it at the height of what might be called “core fever” in fashion. A new look seemed to be arriving on social media feeds every week, driven by gen Z’s love of blink-or-miss-it microtrends. “Wake up babe, there’s a new aesthetic,” seemed an apt and amusing way to sum up the times.
The idea of “core” in fashion dates back to 2014, when trend-forecasting agency K-Hole described a bland and anonymous aesthetic they saw on the streets of New York as “normcore”. Now a descriptor that is applied to everything from from gen Z’s cult style icon Adam Sandler to characters in video games, the suffix has since been joined by what feels like thousands of things – from “corpcore” (meaning a corporate, businesslike look) and“clowncore”, to one of my favourites, the anything-goes “weirdcore”.
