Is touristcore the new must-trend? A dreamy travel aesthetic for a the post-pandemic world

Clumsy, trafelate, badly-dressed – so in 1988 the artist Duane Hanson represented, in a series of hyperrealistic sculptures, the stereotype of the tourist. Their boisterous clothes, which sacrificed aesthetics to practicality, were for his time the maximum expression of a kitsch taste that, in the years of mass tourism, guided tours and cameras hanging around his neck like jewels, the artist used as a criticism of the consumer society. But that same "tourist aesthetic" that Hanson, but also a photographer like the Englishman Martin Parr, had captured with so much precision and irony forty years ago, made of oversized garments, vibrant and maximalist patterns, sneakers and cargo shorts, took on new cultural meanings. In recent times, thanks to the rise of streetwear and the de-formalization of dress codes in an ironic key – a very wide aesthetic shift often called "aesthetics of the ugly" has taken place and, with the new meanings that the dimension of travel will take on in the post-pandemic world, prepares to emerge as a style in its own right that we could define, in the absence of a better term , the touristcore.

Before the pandemic, in fact, the world of travel represented a cultural sector in its own right but it always remained related to a luxury dimension that today is decidedly antiquated. Travel and tourism, however, were reinterpreted in 2020, the year of closures and smartworking, in an escapistic and naturalistic key with the gorpcore trend – the one that transported the aesthetics of mountaineering and hiking into fashion, paving the way for the entry of the utility world into that of luxury. Gucci x The North Face's recent capsule and Arc'teryx's huge viral popularity in the inner sanctums of fashion communities are just two of the best examples last year of a new aesthetic category of which touristcore could be the next step. In fact, if the world of tourism and that of luxury have been in close communication since Louis Vuitton packed its first suitcase, the street and tourism world tell the tastes of a massified and more democratic society with which the new concept of luxury that has characterized fashion in recent years flirts already years.