Some months back, I was on the top deck of a night bus, rolling through the more esoteric parts of Hackney, when it was suddenly invaded. The doors burst open and the marauders bounded upstairs, claiming every seat, throwing their feet up, cracking open windows and bottles, and cackling. However, this gang did not come from the feverish nightmares of people who spend too much time mainlining public transport attack videos on X. Instead of ballies, zipper hoods, and reappropriated COVID masks, they wore a uniform of mullets, mustaches, tote bags, five-panel caps, and oversized T-shirts with pictures of anthropomorphic peanuts, pickles, and pizzas on them. The mob spoke a strange dialect: part Stoke Newington, part New South Wales, it was loaded with references to dirty margaritas, “home-style deep-dish joints,” Amyl & the Sniffers tickets, and the ins and outs of working holiday visas.In the weeks that followed, I noticed more and more of their sort; sharing roll-ups outside coffee shops that had their own resident DJs, stuffing themselves with gut-busting ‘sandos’ and ‘sarnies’ on Reels, posing in chef aprons outside the old boozers they had swamped, boasting of bringing “a slice of Melbourne cafe culture to Deptford.” As someone who is rattling through their mid-thirties, these people were subtly yet significantly different to tribes I’d encountered in London before. They appeared astoundingly confident in the face of this absurd, cutthroat city. They had not just accepted the gentrification that I spent my twenties half-heartedly kicking against, they seemed utterly liberated by it.In short, they looked like they didn’t have a care in the world—because this city was theirs now. “The Norman is what the yuppie was to 1985 or metrosexuals were to Blairite Britain.”I quickly realized they needed a name. After much deliberation, some friends and I landed on calling them “Normans”—a reference to a recently-departed North London cafe-restaurant that had been a kind of spawning point for these people and had generated a thousand think pieces about ‘class appropriation’ due to its menu of chippy teas and meagre fried breakfasts that looked like something a toddler might serve you in a Wendy house. The Norman is the defining person-type of 2025. They are what the yuppie was to 1985 or metrosexuals were to Blairite Britain: a socio-economic style tribe born not of a desire to be different but a desperation to fit in. When I started thrashing out a few thoughts about Normans on X, many people in the replies already had their own names for the movement—things like “neo-millennial aussiecore”; “Margate-core”; “DIY-bubble infantilism”—while in the United States they seem to call it “safe sleazy” for some reason.To understand a group you must understand what they covet and the Norman appears to be obsessed with the following things: bikes, beer gardens, day festivals, Turnstile, “chilled reds,” Confidence Man, The Bear, weekends in Marseille, Instagram chefs who use death metal typefaces, sharing-plates with orange writing on them, soft-scoop ice cream, Loyle Carner, and steady-state cardio. Outside of the occasional blowout at a Bistrot Freddie or Cafe Cecilia they appear to exist solely on a diet of sandwiches, featuring any combination of harissa, pastrami, kimchi, “parm,” and sriracha. These are usually made under railway arches and served with a peculiar tone that somehow manages to be obsequious and arsey at the same time, as if someone told them once that manners were for nerds but they can’t quite shake their original programming.Although they congregate in urban areas, with a bounty of high-end food and drink available on every corner, they always seem to be queuing for something, a state of being that recalls the darkest days of the Soviet Union.In London, their favored hunting grounds are Lower Clapton, Blackstock Road, and Deptford Market, but missionaries for the Norman cause have settled in Manchester, Bristol, Margate, and Dublin. (They have even been sighted in Bolton—which, for non-UK readers, is a deeply unglamorous satellite town located in the foothills of some foreboding moorland, most famous for producing light entertainment stars and something called a “pasty barm”—where two people, likely a pair of Normans, recently opened up a cafe serving “Butties: 10 ’til 4. Brews & bakes: 8 ’til 4. Booze: 12 ’til late.” The language here is textbook Norman, as is the establishment’s telltale orange signage.) I’ve also seen it in Brussels and Paris, but not Berlin or Madrid, where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo still clings to aesthetic supremacy in the hipster districts. I have never been to Australia, but people tell me that the Norman lifestyle is very Australian.Fashion-wise, the look is part Paul Mescal, part Happy Days, with strong nods to Mac DeMarco (very much the Chuck Berry of Norman culture) and Matty Matheson. For the guys, the uniform is Everpress T-shirts, slip-on vans, short shorts, and rings, often combined with Aussie Rules grooming. For the girls, the look is less defined, though you could certainly pinpoint a taste for floaty white dresses, headbands, and handkerchief headscarfs.“The leaders of this space are not moody, tortured musicians, writers, or artists, but childlike experts in consumption.”However, the key component of the Norman aesthetic is not so much the clothing as the cartoonish graphic design plastered across every single item of it, from totes to tube socks to Ts. In a movement where everyone seems to be constantly starting their own business, the enterprises that the Normans run have an obsession with recasting objects and foodstuffs as sentient beings—think whistling donuts with legs, skateboarding beer bottles, licentious pizza papas. Evoking the post-war Americana of small-town “mom and pop” stores, Norman design is deliberately non-threatening and the benign often lapses into the puerile. “I saw the worst T-shirt,” one friend winced recently. “It was like… a pickle man with a dick? Fucking gross.” The leaders of this space are not moody, tortured musicians, writers, or artists, but childlike experts in consumption: the food influencer Jesse Jenkins, Eating With Tod (though many Normans will deny this), ‘the guys at Yard Sale,’ ‘the guys at Cafe Mondo,’ What Willy Cook, and the hungover chefs who appear on Topjaw and refuse to name any establishment beyond a 1km radius of their flat. They love calling people ‘brother’ or ‘buddy’ or ‘bro.’ (As far as I can tell, the Norman subculture is predominantly a male one, though not in a laddy way. Every time I see them hanging out, there are always women around, often in a 50:50 split. It may just be that the female form of Normanism is yet to come fully and vividly into view.) As I considered this phenomenon, it occurred to me that I had only seen this world from a distance. My own version of the urban consumer experience tends to involve establishments that are only “buzzy” because of all the flies in the toilet; most of my time is spent with people who see mobility scooters outside of pubs as a green flag. The truth was I had no real idea who the Normans were, no reliable grasp of their fantasies and anxieties, no clue as to what they wanted from life and what kept them up at night.So, across the span of one scorching midsummer weekend, I set out into the Elephant’s Foot of London Normanism, to listen, to learn, and to observe more closely. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Top Cuvée (@topcuvee)I’d been on North London’s Blackstock Road for five minutes, and had already counted one man in a Perelló picante olives T-shirt, another advertising a Chinese takeaway based in the American Midwest, and another in one that said something about gabagool and “hoagies.”I began my expedition here because Blackstock Road, a previously unremarkable through-road linking Finsbury Park and Highbury, is now a place where nigh-on every pub table has its own Yard Sale pizza QR code, which boasts not one but two branches of the wine startup Top Cuvée, as well as a Roman pasta restaurant co-owned by a White Lotus actor and approximately 1.5 Hinge dates per square meter. In need of back up, I met a friend who lives nearby. After a quick livener at an Arsenal theme pub we strolled over to Top Cuvée, which has a vibe loaded with Norman signifiers: cloudy drinks, bubbly orange writing, aprons worn over white T-shirts, peaked cycling hats. When passing at sunset on a Friday, I’ve often felt that if Normanism is the new Britpop, this might be its Good Mixer. The place was heaving. The restaurant (which charges £12 for a plate of broccoli) was a no-go, and the bench outside was occupied by a group of fintech Gracie Abramses, so we opted to stand. A Norman with a mustache and a mullet brought us a drinks menu, then came back with two very small glasses of house red, which cost just south of £20. When he stuck a card machine in our faces, there was a strange sense of unreality at play. Technically, I was working, and this was just research, yet it still felt like an affront—like getting mugged in a dream. In the corner of my eye, I noticed a couple who’d purchased a whole bottle of luminous yellow plonk, which, unable to consume inside, they’d leant up against a tree that pavement stains told me had very recently been caked in dog piss. Looking at the website the next day, I learned this opportunity may have cost them as much as a ticket to a Premier League game. ‘What a strange culture these people have carved out for themselves,’ I thought, en route to an ocakbasi over the road. The next morning, I visited another Norman spawning point: Rogue Sarnies in Bethnal Green, one of London’s many ‘viral sandwich joints.’ This wasn’t just a place I’d seen on Instagram, I had actually been there myself, experiencing a typically bizarre slice of Norman customer service. Turning up in search of a stomach-lining early dinner, I asked one of the chefs if they were open: “Yeah, we’ve been open for a few weeks now, buddy,” came the response. Slightly wrong footed by his assumption that I was asking about the business’s current trading status, I could only reply, “I meant, like… are you serving food?” “Oh, no, just 12-4 on weekdays,” he mumbled. Bro must still have been trapped in that buzzy, opening-day viral hype, my guy.This time, though, I was determined to eat at Rogue Sarnies. So I took my place in a queue wider than it was long, which was being placated with a dart board and a soundsystem pumping out “Babycakes.” I ordered a “Lord Nelson,” a beef and cheese number that is apparently their signature dish, and was given a waiting time of between 12 and 22 minutes. There was a Spanish couple struggling with the tablet-based ordering system. There were frozen margaritas and beers on sale, but also cans of Rubicon and Fanta, and packets of Nik Naks and Frazzles. The whole effect was somewhere between a New York bodega and a train station vending machine—a concept you can very much imagine appearing on a seed capital investment pitch. The experience wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. I came expecting a storm of event-glamor, something akin to eating a new Supreme drop, but in fact, it was all quietly efficient. The sandwich itself was good, certainly better than any other sandwich I’d had that week. But really, it just tasted like a cheese and beef sandwich. All of which begged the question, is it really the sarnies and the hoagies and the pizzas and the pickles that attract people into the Norman tendency, or the associated lifestyle and worldview it gestures toward? Making my way through the sandwich, trying not to choke on tin foil, I eavesdropped on a few conversations, expecting to overhear some hilarious nugget I could fire down into my iPhone notes. But there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy being said. Then I looked at the way people were dressed—a lot of New Balance, Salomons, T-shirts, and hats—and it hit me: I was wearing pretty much the same thing; in fact, I do most days. I live five minutes away from Rogue Sarnies and I look kind of like one of these people. Am I Norman, too?This thought kicks off a bit of a crisis of faith in my head. For so long I’d prided myself on being somehow separate and apart from all this, as being an envoy from some more authentic universe. But really, I was just another 30-something victim of the rental economy, looking to wash away my future in a deluge of consumables. Perhaps the only thing that set me apart was a lack of tattoos and a certain amount of self-loathing. As I made my way home, past the traffic panhandlers and muzzled dogs of the Bethnal Green Road—which now sit belly-to-belly with places like Rogue Sandwiches and Cav & Coupette and Satan’s Whisker—I thought about the London I had come of age in, and what happened in the years since I stopped caring so much. The memories that pushed through the haze were of chaos and degradation; the flats with holes in the ceiling, the clubs without fire protocols, the dangerous and delusional people who sometimes still rush me in my dreams. I was sure there were people still living like that, somewhere in London, but the Normans—this era-defining, bar-setting demographic—appeared to have little crossover with the darkness. Instead, they lived in a highly-consumerist and cosseted version of a city. The whole town is made for them now, really, ready to be snapped up, branded, expanded, and moved on as soon as the queue begins to slow. There is no context to their world, no history, no sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Places like these are just there—a transitory urban playground, waiting to become something else. It’s not so much late-stage gentrification as end-game gentrification. Whatever happens next doesn’t really matter. But ultimately, I am closer than I would like to be to these people; no matter how much I try to hide in the margins. And worst of all, I probably helped lay the path for it all, Britain’s second Norman Invasion.Follow Clive Martin on X @clive_mart1nMarta Parszeniew is on Instagram @m.parszeniewThe post Meet The Normans: The Defining Person-Type of 2025 appeared first on VICE.