If you’re anywhere near the same age as me, you’ll remember an advertising campaign for Twix that featured a grey-looking man dressed up as a loser (unmistakable even to a child of 12), with a voice like John Major’s, who was called The Norm.

The Norm was, according to the advert, a huge drag. He was a dweeb. He wasn’t cool. He followed you around like those gremlins in the illiteracy adverts. Eating a Twix was your only guaranteed escape from his company.

But The Norm, in his Fair Isle tank top, anorak and – yes – plaid, now looks for all the world like a prescient etching of a latterday hipster. In fact he is precisely that, if the current hype around #normcore is anything to go by.

#Normcore is the latest buzzword to have been appropriated to try and get a handle on what young people (and not so young people) are wearing these days. It was frenziedly ripped from an essay by Christopher Glazek for a trend-forecasting agency before anyone had established what it really meant, and so has turned out to be wrong.

#Normcore means acting like the most extreme version of normal for whatever group you’re in – so if you’re at a football match, you’re in head-to-toe kit and you know every single one of the chants. What people have mistakenly been calling #Normcore is actually called (by the same trend forecaster) Acting Basic – and that’s where the #TwixNorm’s wardrobe comes in. Keep up.

Acting Basic is wearing stonewash mum (or dad) jeans with a poloneck. The strapping on of Velcro nerd sandals in order to strut down Kingsland Road. A high-waisted chino with an ‘and what?’ attitude, and a Dad blouson worn on a night out. I thought I saw Bruno Brookes at a gig the other week, until I realised the person in the baggy black shirt with a Labrador haircut was too young to even know who Bruno Brookes was.

As far as I can see it, there are two different strands to Acting Basic: one, a generation of women inspired by Phoebe Philo, Stella McCartney et al into dressing in a sort of comfortable, sporty elegance of high-end sweatshirts and trainers, and who have earned this right in heels and bodycon over the past ten years. The other is a generation of young people standing round the concept of irony in a lynch mob and battering it to death while dressed as American tourists, Napoleon Dynamite or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and screaming the word ‘#normcore’ over and over again. (The ‘#’ is silent.)

I do get it: part of the joy of being young is dressing terribly and thinking you look great. It’s this sort of devil-may-care, absolute ignorance and lack of awareness that characterises those golden years before everything makes you anxious and your hangovers last for three days and you realise how awful you used to be. But as a friend who teaches fashion undergraduates told me recently, his students aren’t dressing outrageously and flamboyantly – they’re in navy jumpers and Celine-esque slip-ons.

And that’s the fashion version, remember – the rest of them look like Tom Selleck.

Before the Sixties, young people were identikit woodcuts of their parents – like baby Jesus in medieval paintings is always just a very small man, rather than a child. So what were the Sixties for, if we’re about to slide back into being little old people?  With the renouncement of personal style, will we give up those other liberties that came from Flower Power and youthquake? Acting Basic is a worryingly conservative trend that young people have, across more than just fashion, mistaken for rebellion. Wearing mum jeans is not sticking it to the man; neither is drinking coffee.

Culturally, we've so prioritised being wealthy, settled and surrounded by status markers like houses and handbags that children now aspire to be grown-ups above and beyond enjoying not being grown-ups, whether they're sexualised toddlers or teenagers dressing like suburban yuppies.

It’s the Hipster 2.0, the last youth movement that wasn’t really a movement and had at its empty centre only American Apparel, social status and a tattoo of Terry Richardson’s face. So let’s not dress Acting Basic up as a cultural event. And if we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least get the name right.