Let's Talk About Bookcore

[sood]

what does the suffix "core" signify in fashion vocabulary?

 

[dieworkwear]

what does the suffix "core" signify in fashion vocabulary?

It's an aesthetic centered around a theme or feature. It's not limited to fashion, but generally focused on fashion or fashion-related things. Can include interior design, photography, or Instagram stuff.

 

['patanoster]

#bookcore #tiredofwearingCitysuitsdaily #gettingolderdressingforcomfort #boyer #earthtones #canaFedorabefarbehind?

View attachment 1736399

This is very tasteful eccentricity. We can only assume the fedora is just out of shot.

 

[Daniel Hakimi]

what does the suffix "core" signify in fashion vocabulary?

I mostly just take it as a generic suffix to round out the name of a style, because "book" is not really a good term to use to refer to a general style.

I feel like it's derived from "hardcore," like, "this dude is hardcore into books," or, in the case of, say, comfycore, "this dude is super hardcore about comfiness." This etymology amuses me, whether it's correct or not.

 

[JFWR]

Isn't -core a result of hardcore punk being shortened to hardcore and hardcore being attributed to the lifestyle associated with it?

 

[Daniel Hakimi]

Isn't -core a result of hardcore punk being shortened to hardcore and hardcore being attributed to the lifestyle associated with it?

Is that a thing? I'm not into punk, I wouldn't know how people talk about "hardcore punk," but I'd buy that etymology.

 

[emptym]

Has anyone mentioned Jason of BrokeAndBespoke (also @jchosko here)?:





He has great, bookish style, imo.

 

[am55]

Orwell gave the bookcore definition a try back in 1936 (even has "shabby-genteel"):

Spoiler

Ha! A customer--potential, at any rate. Gordon stiffened himself.
Standing by the door, you could get an oblique view out of the
front window without being seen yourself. He looked the potential
customer over.

A decentish middle-aged man, black suit, bowler hat, umbrella, and
dispatch-case--provincial solicitor or Town Clerk--keeking at the
window with large pale-coloured eyes. He wore a guilty look.
Gordon followed the direction of his eyes. Ah! So that was it!
He had nosed out those D. H. Lawrence first editions in the far
corner. Pining for a bit of smut, of course. He had heard of Lady
Chatterley afar off. A bad face he had, Gordon thought. Pale,
heavy, downy, with bad contours. Welsh, by the look of him--
Nonconformist, anyway. He had the regular Dissenting pouches round
the corners of his mouth. At home, president of the local Purity
League or Seaside Vigilance Committee (rubber-soled slippers and
electric torch, spotting kissing couples along the beach parade),
and now up in town on the razzle. Gordon wished he would come in.
Sell him a copy of Women in Love. How it would disappoint him!

But no! The Welsh solicitor had funked it. He tucked his umbrella
under his arm and moved off with righteously turned backside. But
doubtless tonight, when darkness hid his blushes, he'd slink into
one of the rubber-shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian Convent,
by Sadie Blackeyes.

[...]

Ping! The shop bell. Gordon turned round. Two customers, for the
library.

A dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a
draggled duck nosing among garbage, seeped in, fumbling with a rush
basket. In her wake hopped a plump little sparrow of a woman, red-
cheeked, middle-middle class, carrying under her arm a copy of The
Forsyte Saga--title outwards, so that passers-by could spot her for
a high-brow.

Gordon had taken off his sour expression. He greeted them with the
homey, family-doctor geniality reserved for library-subscribers.

'Good afternoon, Mrs Weaver. Good afternoon, Mrs Penn. What
terrible weather!'

'Shocking!' said Mrs Penn.

He stood aside to let them pass. Mrs Weaver upset her rush basket
and spilled on to the floor a much-thumbed copy of Ethel M. Dell's
Silver Wedding. Mrs Penn's bright bird-eye lighted upon it.
Behind Mrs Weaver's back she smiled up to Gordon, archly, as
highbrow to highbrow. Dell! The lowness of it! The books these
lower classes read! Understandingly, he smiled back. They passed
into the library, highbrow to highbrow smiling.

Mrs Penn laid The Forsyte Saga on the table and turned her sparrow-
bosom upon Gordon. She was always very affable to Gordon. She
addressed him as Mister Comstock, shopwalker though he was, and
held literary conversations with him. There was the free-masonry
of highbrows between them.

[...]

Ping! Shop bell. Gordon turned. Another customer.

A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped
Nancifully in. Moneyed, obviously. He had the golden aura of
money. He had been in the shop before. Gordon assumed the
gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers. He repeated
the usual formula:

'Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for
any particular book?'

'Oh, no, not weally.' An R-less Nancy voice. 'May I just BWOWSE?
I simply couldn't wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible
weakness for bookshops! So I just floated in--tee-hee!'

Float out again, then, Nancy. Gordon smiled a cultured smile, as
booklover to booklover.

[...]

He
stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry
shelves and taken out a large expensive book on the Russian ballet.
He was holding it delicately between his pink non-prehensile paws,
as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs. Gordon knew
his type. The moneyed 'artistic' young man. Not an artist
himself, exactly, but a hanger-on of the arts; frequenter of
studios, retailer of scandal. A nice-looking boy, though, for all
his Nancitude. The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-
smooth as the inside of a shell. You can't have a skin like that
under five hundred a year. A sort of charm he had, a glamour, like
all moneyed people. Money and charm; who shall separate them?

[...]

The door-bell clanged. Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed
noisily in. One pink and fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous
bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin, emitting a super-
feminine scent of Parma violets: the other middle-aged, tough, and
curried--India, presumably. Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy
young man slipped through the doorway as apologetically as a cat.
He was one of the shop's best customers--a flitting, solitary
creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by some strange
manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.

[...]

Another customer arrived, for the library. An ugly girl of twenty,
hatless, in a white overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face
and powerful spectacles that distorted her eyes. She was an
assistant at a chemist's shop. Gordon put on his homey library
manner. She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear's
followed him into the library.

[...]

The Nancy had put his book back in
the wrong shelf and vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman,
with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed pince-nez--schoolmarm
possibly, feminist certainly--came in and demanded Mrs Wharton-
Beverley's history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy
Gordon told her that they hadn't got it. She stabbed his male
incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out again. The thin young
man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H.
Lawrence's Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its
head buried under its wing.

Gordon waited by the door. Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with
a strawberry nose and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking
over the books in the sixpenny box. The two upper-middle-class
ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the
table. Fruity-face cast reluctant backward glances at the dog-
books, but curry-face drew her away, resolute not to buy anything.
Gordon held the door open. The two ladies sailed noisily out,
ignoring him.

He watched their fur-coated upper-middle-class backs go down the
street.

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200021.txt

@RSS

 

[am55]

.

 

[OldTown]

There isn't really much I'm seeing any different than ivy league other than maybe some purposeful bad tailoring. It reminds me of "Dark Academia" cosplay. Another try hard fashion movement that is a rehash of things already done.

 

[Adsky Luck]

I loved the Bookcore article because it so perfectly captures the lifestyle I've slowly gravitated towards over the last few years. Something about aimlessly browsing a dusty old bookstore (my go-to in Chicago is Myopic) with a tote bag under your arm and no plans for the rest of the day is such a special feeling.

This is a lifestyle I am aiming to settle into too.
Not quite there yet but am working on it.

 

[radicaldog]

Woody Allen made some cool movies, but maybe he's not the best person to celebrate these days.

He has been completely exonerated multiple times: https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...ary-is-pure-pr-why-else-would-it-omit-so-much

I don't mean to derail this, it's just that many years ago I started a thread on WA as a style icon, and Vox started saying he was just a random scruffy geezer, so I'm enjoying this whole bookcore thing as belated vindication, and also wondered why Derek had omitted this obvious high profile representative of the style.

 

[radicaldog]

There isn't really much I'm seeing any different than ivy league other than maybe some purposeful bad tailoring. It reminds me of "Dark Academia" cosplay. Another try hard fashion movement that is a rehash of things already done.

I disagree. Maybe I'm only saying this because I dress quite a bit like this, but it's a much more modern and less cosplay-ish style than either Ivy or Dark Academia. For example, Bookcore can include fleece, modern trainers, some modern technical clothes, etc.

 

[OldTown]

I disagree. Maybe I'm only saying this because I dress quite a bit like this, but it's a much more modern and less cosplay-ish style than either Ivy or Dark Academia. For example, Bookcore can include fleece, modern trainers, some modern technical clothes, etc.

Ok, so who makes these rules of differentiation then?

 

[FlyingMonkey]

I'm really not surprised to see some of the reactions here (which is why I suggested on page 1 that CM might not be the best part of the forum for this discussion), but I am quietly smiling in particular at the notion of members of a forum that promotes dressing like 1950s film stars as 'classic' and normal having issues with 'cosplay.' As I've said before, this is all cosplay, and more importantly, before anyone gets the wrong end of the stick again, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Perhaps we can seek some other aesthetic critique than devaluing the contribution of particular subcultures to style... what this thread seems to be looking for is inspiration and connections across subcultural styles instead, and that is a good thing.