What’s with all the cores that are popping up with great regularity? Core seems to be the suffix of choice started out by Millennials and grabbed by Gen Zs to label a certain trend they see, mostly in fashion. So like mushrooms popping up, something-cores just start to exist in social media and spread like wildfire.

Core is said to have come from the French word coeur, meaning heart, to explain the central idea of what a style stands for.

Normcore

We started this blog in 2017 so we were late in the game of cores. Apparently this all started in 2014 with Normcore, unisex fashion that is supposed to be functional, comfortable, relaxed, unpretentious, like jeans and shirts. It was translated to interior design that is also functional, a back-to-basics design, lots of white for easy living.

Cottagecore

Homebound: Rural Escapism as a Way to Deal With the Quarantine

At the start of the lockdowns in 2020, a new trend emerged in fashion, followed by interior design. The style was called cottagecore, also known as countrycore, farmcore, or cabincore, among other things. This core is basically about romanticizing agricultural life, traipsing around the countryside in a flowing dress, embracing sustainability, making handcrafted items, loving vintage.

Probably this is triggered by what a forecasting company called Rural Escapism. “We’re seeing consumers use inspiration from homesteading and slow living as a way of coping with mandated stay-at-home measures.” (Allyson Rees, WGSN)

Cluttercore

A New Trend in Home Interiors: CLUTTERCORE

A far cry from Minimalism, Cluttercore is a celebration of collections, things, and heirlooms, and putting them on display around the house. Be careful though. Make sure that you can still go around your house unobstructed, and that it will not look like a contender for that television series Hoarding: Buried Alive.

Carnivalcore

Fun and Whimsy with Carnivalcore

The most recent in a line of cores is Carnivalcore. This is giving your home your personal stamp left, right, and center. It is an imaginative, self-indulgent, whimsical, fun way to decorate your home. This is a bold interior design style because it extensively expresses a homeowner’s taste and inner life.

The Score with Cores

Let me share my thoughts about trends.

Setting trends can be exhilarating, and that is open to a few chosen ones in the world today who have the originality and who can cut through the incredible noise and set their unique mark. Spotting trends can also be exciting, especially if you have the eye, and can guide your clients to make the next best must-haves that people “need”. Following trends is another ballgame entirely. The ease of sharing and adding our voice to the slew of noise already existing in the world today makes following trends a dizzying activity.

If you surf the web or you’re regularly on social media (it doesn’t really matter which platform), you will notice that once something interesting is posted, it spreads like wildfire, and very soon many have jumped on the bandwagon and have become “experts” on the subject at hand, e.g. makeup, fashion, exercise, health, cooking, design, art…the list goes on.

Our biggest tip in this blog is to let it be—follow your heart, speak with your own voice, do what you love, just be yourself. This goes for how you dress, how you talk, how you think, including how you design your home.

So when we are asked what paint colors would look good in their homes, we would find it presumptuous to choose the colors for you.

Colors are very personal and should express your emotions and your definition of home. What we can do to help is to provide you with a wide range of choices…thousands, in fact. It may be a challenge for you (a luxury problem) but the exploration of what colors to paint your home with can be very exciting.

Click on this link and find help from the Boysen app, a very useful tool in your color search.

Author

Annie is the Managing Editor of Let it B | MyBoysen Blog. An unrepentant workaholic, she runs this blog and her own company Talking Lions (https://talkinglions.com). She thrives on collaborating with people who are good at what they do, and working together with them to create something special. Annie learned interior styling while managing her own wholesale business in the Netherlands, importing high-end, handmade home furnishings to stock four outlets and a showroom in the country.

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