Recession-Core Is Trending on TikTok and Red Carpets, but Honestly It Just Highlights Class Divide

From tie-dye everything and camo prints to throwback perms and constantly creasing jeans, recession-core is invading our feeds, red carpets and celebrity selfies. However, underneath the nostalgia, this aesthetic highlights the stark class divides still present in society.

Inaccessibility and performative poverty

With many influencers promoting recession-core from their designer homes, the trend comes across as performative and inauthentic. It glorifies a time many lived in actual poverty, further distancing elite circles from the daily struggles of working class people. There’s a deep lack of awareness or care around the realities of economic hardship.

Whitewashing of hard times

By filtering recession-core through a lens of ironic fashionability and aspirational aesthetics, it whitewashes the deep impact recessions had on communities of color. The trend reduces suffering to an aesthetic, erasing the racial injustices and systemic oppression that made hard times much harder for Black people and other minorities.

Appropriation of working class culture

Like many trends appropriating aspects of working class culture, recession-core contributes to the trivialization of struggles faced by marginalized groups. It turns poverty into just another style, exploiting the cultures of the working class as yet another fashionable commodity to be consumed by the elite.

Seeking inspiration, not understanding

While the intent behind recession-core may be seeking inspiration in working class aesthetics, the outcome highlights a profound lack of understanding around the realities of economic hardship. Styles are appropriated, not learned from. There is admiration without empathy.

Recession-core underscores the distance between elite circles and the working class.

Though recession-core brings gritty, recession-inspired styles to the mainstream, it does so by filtering them through the lens of ironic fashionability – thus emphasizing the class divides that persist in society and the distance between those who glorify hardship as a trend and those who suffer from it as a reality.