When luxury became accessible, dressing down became the ultimate prestige signal

Evidence

Normcore embodied the logical progression of fashion democratization. As blogs and e-commerce made designer goods widely accessible, the ultimate countersignal was to dress as if clothing didn’t matter. However, this approach had its limits: As fashion journalist Lauren Sherman noted, normcore made women look less “hip or chic” and more like “a mom.” And despite its aspirations toward futurism, normcore was another iteration of retromania. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 407

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘countersignal’ logic — dressing down to show taste — echoes Bourdieu’s distinction mechanisms and connects to Marx’s core status-dynamics mechanism.
• QUESTION: Does normcore’s gendered penalty (women read as ‘a mom’) complicate the claim that blankness equalizes, or just re-channel status?