Everything is blokecore now

Blokecore has been heard of for some time, a trend that defines the era of the 'New Normality' for football jerseys, as defined in the nss sports book '2017-2022 Les Vetements De Football'. As is so often the case with trends, when they spread beyond borders, the original meanings are diluted, like a mobile phone, where the meaning of the term is initially clear and drawn with thick black borders, only to be abused in the end. There is a feeling that blokecore is becoming 'anything with a football jersey in the look', but any football jersey worn off the pitch is not an example of blokecore. Fashion has so far managed to avoid distorting and engulfing the world of football and its style - a great achievement considering what has happened to subcultures like punk and clubbing - by managing to bring the jerseys into their own territory and letting the creators and influencers tell the story.

The football jersey has already left the subcultural dimension behind and become a mass phenomenon, but this should not blind us to the importance of the trend and the role of the jersey, which has not changed its meaning but only expanded it by a subset, intersecting with the cyclical nature of the fashion industry. From the creatives came the push for a phenomenon that had been around for a few years, driven by the popularity of the trend on TikTok and by Gen Z. The spread of terrace imagery, Sambas and the lens on all things archival then added virality to the trend, with football jerseys filling a gap in the relationship of inspiration between sport and fashion previously occupied by basketball and American football jerseys.

What is blokecore really?

Recently on nss sports we wrote about the difficulty of defining 'who owns the jerseys", where ownership is not to be sought in a single person but in a system of codes. It is not easy to find an answer, especially given the recent popularity of football kits, which now belong to the sport, the pitch and to the group of enthusiasts who associate their joys and disappointments with this symbol. After all, fans have always worn the jersey in the stadium with jeans or casual trousers and no one would have called it blokecore until recently. Here comes the thought that perhaps the blokecore, and not the football jersey, belongs first and foremost to fashion, a system of codes and mechanisms that makes it possible to extend an aesthetic to its limits - from the catwalks of Fashion Week to the bedrooms of TikTok creators.

Conversely, this means that it is not enough for a brand to deconstruct a jersey or design a football-inspired garment to fly its flag in the football aesthetic. This distinction serves to defend the football jersey as it is traditionally understood and those who simply want to use it in the stadium without engaging in the fashion and lifestyle relationships that matter little on the pitch.

Is fashion taking over football?

Ever since fashion left its industrial dimension, it has used appropriation and tribute as a means to create collections and shows. At blokecore, one gets the impression that this is not the result of appropriation from the world of football, but that it is fashion that has theorised it as it should be understood. Fashion, with its brands and creators, has narrated something that already existed in a new light, with a nuance peculiar to the web, feeds and TikTok. Fashion has immediately taken the football jersey out of the context of football and put it on its own turf, making it secondary to which season the old jersey belongs or which footballer wore it. So does it really matter if Chiara Ferragni knows Aubameyang, whose jersey she wore during her time at Borussia Dortmund? And how relevant is the controversy among football fundamentalists about the fact that she cut it off?

The yellow jersey with black details just looked good (matched, they would say in Montenapoleone) with the miniskirt and boots, also black. In blokecore, perhaps one should put aside all sentimentality about jerseys and just think of them as an item that can be matched. The third kit of the English second division club is just as valuable as the first one of PSG, Real or Barcelona, if you put it in the right look (or the right fit check, we would say in the parts of TikTok).The blokecore therefore belongs first to the macro community of fashionistas, and if you are also part of the football community, the experience will be complete.

How to recognize a blokecore look?

Wearing football shirts with acetate tracksuits and Air Max simply has always been done, it is the look of people living in very similar urban contexts, such as the suburbs, but it does not start from a styling idea as the trend lives on TikTok. At the sporting event or football match, the shirt does not leave the boundary in which it was born, and this is why it is perhaps improper to cry blokecore, at the risk of fading the path of this new aesthetic phenomenon. In the future, in order not to make the trend and the beauty of jerseys lose their significance, it will be necessary to take into account that between football and blokecore, what changes are first and foremost the tools for evaluating jerseys. If the jersey in football is studied and evaluated more as an object independent of the players - and only afterwards 'I want to see it on the pitch' - for the blokecore the jersey is the piece of an outfit, and, more than in football, the search for volume. Worn in or out of skirts and trousers, the football jersey is for the blokecore a tool to complete a proportion of volumes, as well as a contrast of materials and textures, secondary aspects for football but indispensable, as it happens, for fashion.

Creating separate plans for football jerseys, which have different horizons, helps the football world, fans and brands not to try to lock everything into one watertight compartment. The risk of orthodoxy towards jerseys is to look like that guy who is keen to point out that he has known that band since the first EP. Rather, it is useful to consider the blokecore as an alternative track to the football jersey narrative, which was born with different tasks and has very precise reasons told on equally precise platforms to the new generations. Everything that is a football jersey is not blokecore, everything that is blokecore is not football, in which case one would be exposing oneself to the risk of appropriation.