Research File: Books

RESEARCH FILE: NOTES FROM BOOKS

Lauren Barnes Fashion Brand Management AD6606 1819758

SUBCULTURES: THE BASICS “Subcultures, always suspect, were officially dangerous” “In the decades since the 80s, the number of variety of subcultures has increased, meaning, no doubt, more young people suffer these same uncomfortable conversations” “To outsiders, subcultures can seem alternately strange and silly, mysterious and dangerous, or all of the above. They appear as bizarre little words with secret signs, idiosyncratic rituals, fantastical styles, and arcane social codes. Yet popular perceptions of subcultures, little more caricatures based upon half-truths or hysteria” “In the decades following World War 2, youth cultures exploded in numbers for a variety of reasons: expansions in education created greater space between youth and adult responsibilities; the growth of film, television, and music industries increased youths’ exposure to pop culture and alternative ideas and expanding middles class led to greater disposable income and leisure time; and marketers and parents came to see “teenagers” as a leisure class” “Yet not all youth shared in the prosperity of middle-class families and wealth and income disparities persisted (and often grew). The relative expansion of the middle class in the postwar years quickly gave way to deindustrialization and urban decline, and eventually the conservative regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would undermine the social safety net and accelerate free-market capitalism. In the United Kingdom, scholars associated with the Centre for Contempo-

rary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham studied youth during this time of transition, including many of the “classic” subcultures such as mods and punks. Social class is perhaps the central theme of CCCS subcultural studies. Working-class youth (mainly boys) join together by a virtue of their marginalization from and resistance to the class structure. Subcultures therefore are primary working-class phenomena, a reworking of the class struggle that had been occurring for generations. In fact, the history of subcultures follows the evolution of the working-class styles and identities in the UK, beginning with the teddy boys and leading to the mods and rockers, skinheads, punks, football hooligans, and more recently “chavs”. Anticipating the decline of traditional working-class life, these sub culturists engaged in an ideological battle. Capitalist society produces not only economic exploitation and domination, but cultural domination” “For the CCCS, subcultural identities and resistance were the most visible through spectacular youth styles and rituals. Theories of “mass culture” suggests that prefabricated, shallow, homogenizing, lowest-common-denominator cultural forms pacify people into the complacency or even submission, reinforcing the hegemony” “Subcultures became associated with “spectacular” styles, adherents intentionally making a spectacle of themselves. Stylistic codes simultaneously served two purposes, to set participants apart from “normal” society (and other subcultures) and to establish a particular subcultural identity. Understanding subcultures then involved decoding their style. Subcultural style follows a certain homology, or a synergy with a group’s values and behaviour, skinheads’ steel-toes boots, shaved heads, masculine posturing, and love of beer naturally “fit” with their working-class origins and the context of economic decline. Sub culturists became folk

devils, and blamed for a variety of social ills and symbolizing moral decline”.

The key contributions in subcultural studies made by British scholars during this period include: -subcultures emerge primarily among working-class youth collectively resisting structural impediments to upward mobility; -spectacular styles held ideological meaning beyond mere fashion; -such as styles consisted a symbolic form of resistance; -authorities and the media create moral panics and finally -such a resistance is largely ineffectual, as subcultural style itself is eventually coopted and commodified.

By the early 1990s, many of the classic “underground” subcultures; skinhead, punk, metal- seemed to be hollow representations of their original incarnations, replaced by “grunge” scenes and a resurgence of dance cultures. Raves, and all-night underground electronic dance music parties duelled by drugs such as ecstasy, brought together diverse crowds focused on hedonistic escape than class resistance. In fact, social class, gender, and race seemed less salient, less central for the formation of such scenes. Likewise, rave styles drew from many sources and did not cohere into a rave “uniform”. Finally, while rave certainly spawned communities, they seemed diffuse when compared to gangs of mods of groups of pinks.

The post-subcultural generation blended all sorts of music and fashion as individuals consumed and created their own styles, shopping for fashion and identities in a supermarket of style. Youth groupings, in the form of scenes or neo-tribes, emerge amid a fragmented culture in which the identity becomes unhitched from family, geography and tradition. In a postmodern world, individuals consume and create their own styles. They are less interested in adopting a collective identity, and more passionate about pursing their own creativity and pleasure, drawing from a variety of sources to patch together their own lifestyles.

(Haenflur, 2013)

GENERATION ECSTASY “I finally got it “right” in 1991, as one drop in the demographic deluge that was 1991-92’s Second Wave of Rave, carried along by the tide of formerly indie-rock friends who’d turned on, tuned in, and freaked out. It was some revelation to experience this music in it’s proper context- as a component in a system. It was entirely different that un-rock way of using music: the anthemic track rather than the album, the total flow of the DJ’s mix, the alternative media of pirate radio and specialist record stores, music as a synergistic partner with drugs, and the whole magic/tragic cycle of living for the weekend and paying for it with the midweek comedown. There was a liberating joy in surrendering to the radical anonymity of the music, in not caring about the names of tracks or artists. The “meaning” of the music pertained to the macro level of entire culture, and it was much larger than the sum of its parts” “Hardcore scenes are strongest when they remain remote from all of that and thrive instead as anonymous collectives, subcultural machines in which ideas circulate back and forth between DJs and producers, the genre evolving incrementally, week by week.”

“For the newcomer to electronic and dance music, the profusion of scenes and sub-genres can seem at best bewildering, at worst wilful obfuscation. Partly, this is a trick of perspective: kids who’ve grown up with techno feel it’s rock that “all sounds the same.” The urgent distinctions rock fans take for granted- that Pantera, Pearl Jam, and Pavement operate in separate aesthetic universes- makes sense only if you’re participant in the ongoing rock discourse. The same applies to dance music: step inside, and the genre-itis begins to make sense. Like sections in a record store, the categories are useful. But they’re also a way of talking about the music, of arguing about what it’s for and where it should go.”

(Reynolds, 1999)

NEXT WAVE CULTURES: FEMINISM, SUBCULTURES, ACTIVISM The first major studies of youth subcultures came out of the Chicago School, based in the Sociology of and Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago in the United States from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Researchers here studied youth on the streets and concluded that young people formed street gangs as a rational response to their deprived social and material circumstances. The street gangs gave them a sense of safety, fun, pride, and location, providing temporary, collective solutions to broader social problems of poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, and marginalisation. They say young people’s engagement with an undermining of popular culture in the invention of subcultures as a negotiation of class relations and especially resistance to consumer ideology that tried to seduce working-class youth into passive consumption. They argued that subcultures were always that young people opposed or undermined dominant culture by appropriating or negating its images.

Youth subcultures or lifestyles today are the product of an ongoing process of a negotiation between the consumer culture and creativity. Young people are constantly negotiating the styles that are sold to them with their capacity to create and produce their own; whether this be music, clothes, or lingo. There is no longer any such thing as the truly “resistant” youth subculture, because youth style and culture have been appropriated by the consumer industries, depoliticised and packaged back to youth. Others again argue that youth subcultures still remain and are still political forces, although the kind of politics they are about is inevitable filtered through the forces of individualisations and consumption that characterise youth identities in late modernity.

(Harris, 2012)

FASHION MARKETING BOOK

In some high street shopping centres charity shops seem to be almost as common as new clothing shops. The huge increase in the number of these and second-hand clothing outlets can be explained in many ways. As people buy more new clothing the second-hand clothing shops are an obvious place for them to dispose of their unwanted fashion from last season. Economic reasons could lead us to assume that lack of money means that the only clothing some people can afford is from the second-hand market. Or it could be that more environmentally conscious people are preferring to buy second hand and so recycling clothing rather than always buying new. The retro look of the late 1990s meant that second-hand clothes shops were a good source of desirable genuinely fashionable items.

(Easey, 2009)

REFERENCES Easey, M. (2009). Fashion Marketing. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.

Haenflur, R. (2013). Subcultures: The Basics . Routledge.

Harris, A. (2012). Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism. Oxon: Routledge .

Reynolds, S. (1999). Generation Ecstacy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Psychology Press.