What is kidcore? How fashion wants to return to childhood
«Dress up like a grown up» it is a phrase that, in different forms and settings, we have all heard at least once in our lives. And in Italian culture there has always been a precise definition of what it meant to dress "as an adult" and what it was to dress "as a kid". Adults wear the shirt (white or blue) under the pullover, trousers neither too tight nor too wide, preferably leather shoes but, above all, dark colors, with few concessions made to accessories. It is an office outfit, if you will, a uniform that testifies to the degree of personal seriousness of each one within the life of society. Yet, two years ago, society was disrupted by the lockdown and in the general cultural movement that led individuals and societies to re-evaluate their models of life, the need to "dress up" began to fade. Self-expression, gender liberation, end of office life, nostalgia for childhood years, search for simplicity – all possible motivations behind the traction that, in recent months, has gained the kidcore aesthetic that, to quote Lyst, is all about «right colors, toy-inspired accessories, and clashing prints». A type of style that could have its icon in television characters such as Jules in Euphoria or Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn but which actually has numerous variations.
The origin of this style, however, is not TikTok but Japan: it would be impossible not to see a parallelism or at least a kinship between today's kidcore and the concept of kawaii developed in Japan in the 70s and then exploded together with the popularity of the Harajuku style in the 80s and 90s and the fashion lolita documented by the legendary FRUiTS magazine by Shoichi Aoki. If, however, in the case of lolita fashion the quality of cuteness was a part of the Japanese culture of the time, and was affected by historical, linguistic and cultural influences, the kidcore that today has also spread to the West has a strong nostalgic component. Nevertheless, the cultural motivations behind the two aesthetics are similar: reacting to social impositions and adherence to overly defined gender roles, rejecting the social expectations connected to these roles, redefining one's identity as opposed to a series of values in which one does not recognize oneself but also gaining self-confidence and affirming one's ability to express oneself. This cultural ancestry is important because it was precisely with the fashion lolita that the deliberate infantilism in fashion took on a political connotation.
What is more important to note, however, is that the kidcore you see on TikTok, for example in videos where the same person changes his look according to three or four different styles, is an extremely "pure" and somewhat fictitious version of itself and that, within a fashion collection for example, it always ends up diluting and attenuating but still remains recognizable in the form of a sort of naïveté, of apparent simplification of shapes, volumes or graphics, of extreme stylization or, on the contrary, by an exaggeration of colors and textures that replicates the liveliness and play of childhood. At the base, there are always the values of simplicity and frankness – yet another search for authenticity and reality of an industry and a culture that have explored everything explorable.
