Blokecore – the ‘make-no-effort’ trend we can all love
Stephen Doig and Guy Kelly on why the everyday style of the middle-aged man is having a fashion moment
It’s not often the average, styleunconscious middle-aged man receives good news from the frontline of the fashion industry. More common, when casting a wary eye over the catwalks of Milan and Paris, or the Met Gala red carpet, or even the smarter high streets, is a sense of, “Well, you’d never catch me in that.”
But no more. Because in 2022, there’s every chance that your wardrobe is already bursting with the most on-trend items of the season – even if they’re decades old, battered and ill-fitting. Introducing “blokecore”, the latest style phenomenon that could make you, or at least the most fashionable man in your life, an accidental icon. All he needs to do is make next to no effort.
You have seen many exponents’ blokecore before, even if you haven’t seen the Tiktok videos explaining it. Imagine any run-of-the-mill night down the Crown & Anchor on an unremarkable Wednesday night. Formless, bootcut blue jeans or saggy shorts; an old football shirt; ropey Adidas trainers; possibly an incipient belly; all accessorised with a pint of bitter and three-day stubble.
It is a look as at home in urban football boozers as the short bar in a Cotswolds Travellers Rest. In fact, Jeremy Clarkson – like a Subaru Outback, the ultimate country/city hybrid these days – is perhaps an inadvertent blokecore posterboy. Outside the M25, battered quilted jackets, faded fleeces and baggy old rugby shirts come into play.
Consider the Clarkson view on denim: “It’s not that I love wearing [ jeans]. I simply never think about it, and that’s the point. That’s the appeal. They’re just there for me every morning, in a puddle at the end of the bed. Ready to fulfil my only real requirement from an item of clothing: stopping people from being able to see my genitals.” Blokecore to his core.
We can thank, or blame, social media for elevating Joe Bloggs to style maven. The blokecore trend appears to have been started by Tiktok user Brandon L Huntley, and shuns the new must-haves to celebrate everyday, existing clothes. It would be easy to point to the cost-of-living crisis as a driver, but in reality blokecore is a natural evolution.
The mid-2010s saw the rise of “normcore”, the seemingly bland and safe-safe way of dressing exemplified by the kings of Silicon Valley. Underlining their disruptor status by ditching the suit, they wore neat jeans, simple crewneck sweaters and plain white or black or grey T-shirts. Mark Zuckerberg took it even further by wearing the same outfit every day, reasoning it was one less decision to make. It’s perhaps the only thing he and Clarkson have in common.
Next up was “gorpcore”, a forage into more outdoorsy territory (the “gorp” standing for trail mix – “Good Old Raisins & Peanuts”), whereby dowdy fleeces, orthopaedic walking shoes and the kind of cargo shorts and bucket hats better seen on a Duke of Edinburgh yomp suddenly became fashion catnip. The ascent from practical to must-have by brands like North Face and Patagonia, now as sought-after as high-end sports labels to teenagers, illustrated it. Padded jackets and mountaineering gear then arrived at Paris Fashion Week; next, the US actor and elfin clotheshorse Timothée Chalamet swaddled his frame in so much outdoors wear that he looked as if he was en route to the Cairngorms, not out for an iced frappé.
Alongside those movements, a 1990s revival has flourished. Had you stumbled around Reading Festival last August, you wouldn’t have been sure if you were in 2021 or at a Stone Roses gig in 1994: all bucket hats, baggy jeans and faded T-shirts. Some were vintage pieces, others were new but made to look 25 years old. While England played in Euro 2020, it was the Euro 1996 shirt (and others, ebay reported a 136 per cent rise in searches for the term “retro football shirts”) that teenagers sought, as they sang Baddiel and Skinner’s song at the pub.
That era once looked tainted by “toxic masculinity”, hooliganism and the delusions of Cool Britannia. But today’s kids are savvy, they’ve managed to pick up the clothing but wash out the associations, then pair it with modern attitudes. Look at footballers themselves: once they were scandal-ridden like Paul Gascoigne, now they’re social justice warriors like Marcus Rashford.
“I think there’s a certain snobbery and class divide to looking down on football,” says Elgar Johnson, editorin-chief of new sports-meets-fashion magazine Circle Zero Eight. “But something has really changed and footballers have a great deal of power; the idea that they are stupid and profligate is outdated. Sports and fashion are more aligned than ever.”
Blokecore is the next step on: antique but practical; humdrum but trendy. At its heart, it speaks to the “casualisation” of how men dress today, which started with the rise of “athleisure”. With the decline of traditional tailoring (a trend accelerated by the pandemic, when Marks and Spencer saw a 72 per cent collapse in formalwear sales in its shops), sports attire has become standard practice, even in formal settings – suit jackets with a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, or even a tracksuit top.
“Sportswear has been trending for some time, but we’ve seen it amplified by the pandemic, with people taking up more active pursuits,” says Browns Fashion buying director Dean Cook. “Aside from the obvious comfort factor of sports attire, its popularity comes down to the functionality and durability of the pieces.”
All of which leads to blokecore. It’s nothing groundbreaking – men have been wearing ill-fitting jeans, crusty trainers and sports tops for decades – but it does point to a certain kind of man who doesn’t bother with the fashion game. For years, glossy magazines and retailers have been pushing the idea of what a man who doesn’t wear a suit ought to be seen in, and this is a two fingers up: I’ll just wear what’s crumpled at the end of the bed, thanks.
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” Dolly Parton likes to say. The same could be said of many young blokecore obsessives, who may be wearing the same formless denim jeans and moth-eaten sports tops as any bloke in Swindon Wetherspoons, but they could have spent weeks (and hundreds of pounds) tracking down their “pieces” online. But that is the cyclical nature of fashion: one man’s trash is a Gen Z Tiktokker’s treasure.
You may well be eyeing your wardrobe with a new sense of pride. Is blokecore set to become ubiquitous? It may well do. In the current economic climate, high-end designer denim won’t fly off the shelves. Nor will the “luxe trainer”, which has already gone the way of the Parisian “tramp balls” of the 1920s – when the monied elite would dress like the city’s homeless in a tasteless parade of arrogance – with deliberately shabby-looking varieties selling for four figures.
Why buy those, when you could just dig something out from the back of the cupboard and dress in the comfortable, sturdy clothes of a Clarkson? Prince Charles once suggested that if you wait long enough, your style will come back into fashion. He may have meant hunting tweeds and bespoke doublebreasted suits. But blokecore shows that it’s just as true of your old jeans.
Enjoy your time as a fashionista; you never know when it might end.