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In one of the 20th century’s most influential books on fashion, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the sociologist Dick Hebdige studied the punks, mods, and Teddy boys who hung around London in the 1960s and ’70s. He posited that their funny haircuts and jarring clothing was in fact a form of political rebellion related to their status as young, white, and working class: The mods in their polished suiting, he argued, “undermined the conventional meaning of ‘collar, suit and tie’, pushing neatness to the point of absurdity;” punks responded to the neglect felt from society by “rendering working classness metaphorically in chains and hollow cheeks.”
Basically, Hebdige proposed that style is inherently political, and that its ties to music make it that much more so. That postmodernist, ework remains the dominant method of dissecting subcultural aesthetics today.
The problem is that neither Marx nor Hebdige at the time had ever heard of TikTok. They didn’t know about Instagram or the internet, where so many subcultures are born now. (That is, if you can make the argument that subcultures can still exist today without being immediately swallowed by the mainstream.) It was a lot easier to draw connections between a group’s clothing, the music they listened to, and their socioeconomic status when that group did not exist exclusively in the digital ether, casting doubt on whether it actually exists at all. Continue reading “Share All sharing options for: E-girls and e-boys, explained”