If you have been online at any point in the past few years, you have probably come across a new cultural shorthand: the rise of the “core.” This suffix has become a convenient taxonomy for self-expression in the algorithmic age, a way to collapse complex identities, histories, and politics into digestible moods and monetizable aesthetics. What started as playful categorization now functions as a factory line of identity production, where style replaces substance, and every subculture is stripped for parts, flattened into visual cues optimized for feeds.

Once upon a time, scenes and clubs demanded thresholds of belonging – shared values, music, risk, labor, or lived experience – but now, those gates have been replaced with hashtags. In this new ecosystem of “cores”, participation is no longer about creation or conviction, but consumption. The question is not who you are, it is how well you can imitate the look of someone who once believed in something. We have mistaken performance for presence, and it shows. To understand what has been lost in this shift, it helps to look back at what these aesthetics used to mean before they were branded, bought, and sold as “cores”.

Goth was never just about black eyeliner or leather chokers; it was about making visible what society wanted to repress. Born in the early 1980s as an offshoot of post-punk, goth was about death, despair, and decadence. It was theatrical, yes, but behind the theatrics was deep emotional refusal – a refusal to be happy on command. A refusal to be digestible, to be saved.

Goth was more than a fashion, it was a reaction. It was mourning made beautiful, tradition being inverted, gender being defied, and emotion indulged instead of suppressed. It was also deeply engaged with diverse identity subcultures. Many goths weren’t just playing dress up, they were creating space to exist outside gender, norms, and beauty standards. You did not wear goth to fit in, you wore it knowing you would be misunderstood, possibly harassed, and definitely stared at.

And now? We get soft goth-core, consisting of mesh gloves, slip dresses, “Wednesday Addams” edits, e-girl aesthetics: pouty selfies with crosses, spiderweb nails, and a Lana Del Rey caption. It is not inherently malicious, but it’s hollow. It collapses goth into a mood, reducing it to a color scheme and a soundtrack. It is mourning without death, religion without blasphemy, pain without lineage.

When goth becomes aesthetic, when it fills a Pinterest board or a TikTok feed, it loses its alienation. And if goth does not alienate, then what is it doing? If no one is uncomfortable, if anyone can wear it, it is not goth or rebellion, it is just merch. Goth was a community of those who did not want to be seen, now packaged for visibility. It was a look of the misfit before the misfit was monetisable. And the people who built the look, who faced the alienation and social exclusion that came with it – kids defying social norms, rebels, outcasts – get left behind in the rebrand.

Thrifting used to be for survival. It was not curated, cool, or captionable. It was for people who needed clothes that wouldn’t break the budget. It was for kids whose parents could not buy brand names. For the broke, the displaced, the undocumented, the disabled, the working class. It was also, for many, a way to opt out of capitalism and resist fast fashion’s endless churn in a quiet and often politicised form of anti-consumerism.

But in the core-core era, thrifting became a trend, a sport, and a content category. Not about what you found, but how you styled it, shot it, captioned it, and worst of all, resold it. Enter the reseller economy, where people are buying up racks of decent clothes in bulk. Ironing them, posing with them, and selling them on curated platforms for five to 10 times the thrift price. “Thrifting” became “hauling”, and hauls became hustle, and the hustle made survival unaffordable.

The people who actually rely on secondhand clothes now walk into thrift stores and find $30 Levi’s, $50 boots, $15 baby tees. They are not vintage. They are just extracted from a space that was meant to serve, not perform. Thrift stores themselves, once community resources, caught the algorithmic scent. Prices rose, quality got pulled, and racks got curated for trend appeal. What used to be overlooked is now gatekept by cost. And all in the name of “sustainability.” But what kind of sustainability excludes the people who need it most?

Now, thrift culture isn’t a safety net – it’s a stage. And if you don’t perform poverty correctly, you don’t get to participate in the price.

Carhartt was not made to be cool. It was made to be durable. To last through 12-hour shifts, snow, concrete dust, and calloused hands. The double knees, the canvas, the weight, it was built for survival, not styling. It was worn by construction workers, farmers, warehouse staff, and oil riggers. People who do not post their work because they are too busy doing it. It was not a brand, it was a functional uniform. A second skin that got stained and torn and passed down.

But then came core-core, and Carhartt was reborn. Suddenly, it is on Pinterest boards, Tumblr mood boards, and TikTok #blokecore fits. People who have never poured concrete are layering double knees over vintage Sambas, holding iced coffee instead of tools. The workwear has become performative, the grit has become an accessory. It is not just Carhartt. It is also Dickies. Steel-toed boots. High visibility vests styled ironically. The uniform of the working class, gutted of its class.

And the worst part? The real wearers get pushed out. With the prices spiking and thrift stores getting raided by influencers, the people who need this gear cannot afford it, while those who want to look like them profit off the aesthetic. The blue-collar workers have become invisible in their own clothes.

There is a particular kind of TikTok-coded femininity that borrows Plath, Woolf, Sexton, Didion, sometimes even Arendt or de Beauvoir, and folds them into a hyper-curated aesthetic: muted tones, cigarette filters, black tights, underlined paperbacks (barely cracked), and tea-stained journal entries about nothing in particular. It’s called “coquette” now. Or “sad girl autumn.” But it’s not sadness, depth, or even silence - it’s simulation. It is styling suffering as a soft mood.

Plath and Woolf were far from these passive “it girls”. They were not soft. In fact, they were seething. Plath wrote about domestic entrapment, depression, abortion, trauma, rage, and the violence of femininity. Woolf carved out entire structures of time and consciousness to make women’s lives feel real on her pages. These were writers who could not afford to be aesthetic, they were trying to survive.

What happens in this core-ification is that the actual ideas get stripped from the work. Plath becomes a “Girl Interrupted vibe.” Woolf becomes a girl with a tote bag walking fast through Bloomsbury. The pain becomes pretty, the critique becomes captioned, and the writing becomes a signal, not a conversation. You don’t have to read the work; you just have to look like you have felt something.

When you posture with Plath without wrestling with her, you’re not in literary lineage – you’re in costume. Even worse, you are profiting socially, aesthetically, from a pain you have not earned, a complexity you have not engaged with. Once people stop reading, they start performing. Once the words are gone, the look becomes hollow. Once everyone claims the identity, the meaning thins out. It’s no longer “I read Plath and saw myself.” It is “I saw Plath on Pinterest and thought she matched my outfit.”

Punk emerged in the mid-70s, born from material struggle. It came from working-class kids in crumbling economies, alienated from institutions, channeling their discontent into noise, zines, and DIY rebellion. The aesthetic came second, if at all.

Alt on social media, by contrast, is born from curation. It is assembled through Pinterest boards and TikTok filters, driven by the logic of the algorithm: what is clickable, what is “edgy” but still palatable enough to go viral. There is no real-world condition underpinning it, just mood.

Punk was messy. It was real bodies in cramped venues. It was sweat, spit, and safety pins. You could not fake punk because punk happened in front of people. In context, in conversation, you lived it. Alt today often exists without embodiment. You can wear the mesh top, the fishnets, the chunky boots, and never once go to a protest, pick up an instrument, or question authority.

Punk’s DIY was born of necessity: no one was going to give you a platform, so you built one. You copied your zines, you burned your own demos, you made your own patches. Alt-core buys the look off fast fashion hauls and thrift-flips it for clout. The clothes don’t hold stories; they hold tags. It’s more “Depop alt” than actual dissent; it is not against the system. In fact, it is merch for it. In punk, style meant something. Wearing certain symbols or clothes was often dangerous. Queer punks, anarchists, punks of color. These weren’t looks, these were lines in the sand. Signals.

Today’s core-core alt aesthetics are decoupled from context. You can wear the chains without being chained. You can post “riot grrrl” without ever hearing Kathleen Hanna. The meaning has been abstracted. The reference has been mined, but the risk is gone. There is no one holding you accountable to the culture. No risk, no cost. It’s merely cosplay without consequence.

Core-core collapses under scrutiny because it is all front, no foundation. Aesthetic identities can only go so far before someone asks: “But what do you stand for?” And when that question can not be answered, the facade falls.

But maybe that’s the point of late-capitalist style; the churn, the costume change, the endless rehearsal of meaning without ever having to commit to one. The algorithm rewards aesthetic fluency, not belief. Maybe that is why this era feels so exhausting, because no one is allowed to believe without first branding it. Every subculture, every struggle, every once-radical symbol gets absorbed, sanitized, and sold back to us at double the price. The system does not censor rebellion anymore; it stocks a watered-down version in every size.

In the end, core-core is not just the spread of aesthetics; it is a symptom. It is what happens when capitalism runs out of new things to sell, so it starts selling sincerity. Maybe the real rebellion now is refusal, the choice to live outside the algorithm’s taxonomy, to be authentic with our beliefs and let the aesthetic come second.