Why normal is the new naughty

There’s an episode of the cult US comedy 30 Rock in which Jenna and her boyfriend, Paul, having exhausted every sexual proclivity in the book, decide to invent a new one after boringly falling asleep on the sofa one night.

‘It’s a whole new fetish called normalling,’ they decide. ‘I just had the sickest idea,’ adds Jenna, lasciviously. ‘We go out as a couple to Bed, Bath & Beyond and shop for… home necessities.’

‘Normalling in public?’ asks her partner. ‘You delicious whore.’

We all know about normcore, the word coined in 2014 to describe the trend for anonymous jeans, unbranded sportswear and other middle-aged American tourist tropes. While it’s related, normalling is different. Normalling is the elevation of the mundane into something alluring, exciting and — yes — even a little bit kinky, and come the new year it’s all you will want in your 2018 wardrobe. It’s Vileda mops made into shoes (Christopher Kane’s SS18 show, above), fluffy house slippers (Anya Hindmarch, above), bags inspired by ruffled pillowcases (Mother of Pearl, Maison Margiela), Lego skirts (Mary Katrantzou), string shopping bags (Vetements), shell suits adorned with jewels (Gucci) and rubber gloves made precious by the addition of gemstones (Kane again). Call it normcore on Viagra, if you like.

That these everyday objects have appeared so frequently on the catwalk — both for AW17 and SS18 — is significant. Forget the familiar fashion realm of stealth luxury, private jets and unthinkable wealth — welcome to fashion’s great staycation, whereby the mundane has become exotic. It’s a long-held tradition for designers to cite ‘the jewelled hues of Rajasthan’ or ‘the breezy boho allure of Ibiza’ as inspiration for their shows. This is usually because, as soon as said show has finished, they jet off to exotic foreign climes to rejuvenate and seek fresh stimulation. So what are we to make of this vogue for finding inspiration closer to home; so close that a designer’s biggest muse appears to be their own front room or kitchen?

Is it a Brexit thing? Is it a time-constraint thing? Is elephant trekking in Namibia simply no match for the sweet satisfaction of pulling on your rubber gloves and giving the oven a good scrub? I think we must be told. So I asked Christopher Kane, a designer who stands at the vanguard of the normalling movement. After all, this is the man who turned humble Crocs into objets d’art.

‘No one ever goes there — people are scared to,’ is how Kane explains his fascination with domesticity, ‘because they think it’s not good enough or grand enough.’ Kane grew up in a large working-class family, in a community where all the women were immaculately turned out, regardless of whether they had any money or not. ‘You made do and kept things good,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been brought up to be a snob. Things are not good or bad taste. I don’t think you’ve got the right to say something is ugly or beautiful — it’s in the eye of the beholder.’ His background explains his fascination with the everyday and objects that loftier designers would find boring. ‘Cleaners were always people I related to,’ he says of the 1940s housecoats, dusters and rubber gloves referenced in his show. ‘The men thought they ruled the house, but these women were big, hardcore matriarchs who raised five kids and were also clean freaks. They really were domestic goddesses. How could you not find that amazing?’

In Kane’s hands, the suburban theme becomes a comment on the class system. ‘I love how middle-class people are always trying to be something they’re not,’ he chuckles. ‘Where I grew up in Scotland, we made things look good no matter what they were. You were always well presented, no matter how you were brought up. Who cares if it wasn’t designer? The idea of class is even more apparent now,’ he adds. ‘Brexit left you feeling as though you thought you knew people, but actually you didn’t know anyone. That’s really sad,’ he says.

Anya Hindmarch’s take on suburbia is different — unsurprisingly, given her comfortable middle-class upbringing. While her presentation back in February of this year featured such desultory household objects as scouring pads, her SS18 show took the fetishisation of suburbia even further. For her stage set, Hindmarch constructed a ‘house’, complete with a ‘loft extension’ from which a glitterball dropped down for the finale. Pastel hues of sugar pink and mint green were lifted straight from a suburban front room, as were the textures and fabrics, with fluff, quilting and wallpaper-esque brocades writ large. Accessories were fashioned in the same vein: totes came printed with cats or budgies — surely suburbia’s favourite house pets — and shaggy mules aped old-fashioned house slippers.

‘I’ve always loved the idea of taking something you know and doing it in a really luxurious way. It comes with an automatic point of view before you’ve even started, and then you can mess with it,’ says Hindmarch, who famously turned a crisp packet into a clutch. ‘There’s something comforting, funny and creatively challenging about subverting the way people perceive things they already have an opinion of.’

Hindmarch says she also enjoyed experimenting with some of the techniques used to fashion the objects she was surrounded by in childhood, such as pouffy cushions and candlewick bedspreads. ‘It’s such a personal thing, suburbia, and what it means to us. Most people who live in it try to escape it, and yet in a funny way, there’s comfort in the uniform nature of it. There’s something fascinating about that.’