Words for the day: Normcore and Menocore

I first encountered "normcore" in an episode of the final season of Orphan Black, which would have originally aired in 2016.  The scene as I remember it featured a young woman on the cutting edge of modern fashion and style speaking to a vanilla-bland bespectacled lab worker, describing him as "totally normcore."  When he acknowledged that, her paradoxical response was "that's so cool!" 😀

So I had to look up the word, because I'm pretty normcore myself.  Here are excerpts from Wikipedia:

Normcore is a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious, average-looking clothing. Normcore fashion includes jeans, T-shirts, sweats, button-downs, and sneakers...

In 2013, the word was employed by trend forecasting group K-HOLE in a report titled "Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom".  As used by K-HOLE, the word referred to an attitude, not a code of dress. It was intended to mean "finding liberation in being nothing special".

In 2014, an article in New York magazine by author Fiona Duncan conflated normcore with what K-HOLE referred to as "ActingBasic", a concept which involved dressing neutrally to avoid standing out. It was this misunderstanding of normcore that gained popular usage. That same year, "normcore" was named runner-up for neologism of the year by the Oxford University Press.

In 2016, the word was added to the AP Stylebook.

A variation on this concept for women has been called "menocore" from menopause. It is loose and comfortable clothing, usually in light or neutral colors, that fits a variety of informal social situations. The style suggests that the wearer is mature, self-confident, and not seeking attention from men. Designer brands associated with this style of dress include Eileen Fisher, J. Jill, and Donna Karan.

Columnist Sara Tatyana Bernstein has said that the style suggests that the wearer has leisure time and wealth, giving it class connotations, and that it can be stereotyped as the style of a woman who is middle-aged or older and already wealthy enough that she does not need the kind of job that would require more formal clothing. 

More at the link and elsewhere, but enough for now.