Style

Style is a concept used to describe the ways in which certain consumers, or groups of consumers, assemble, modify, combine, and act toward consumer objects and activities. The concept is notoriously hard to pin down since it is simultaneously used at different levels of abstraction and to denote a wide variety of consumption activities, both within academia and in everyday use. The most clearly defined use of the concept is within literature dealing with subcultures, but it is also applied within studies of fashion as well as consumer culture studies more broadly.

Most of the time when style is discussed, it is designated to those instances when an active stance is taken with regard to consumption; style is intentional communication, according to Dick Hebdige. Still, even the activities that are not driven by such intentionality would typically lead to something considered a style. Moreover, to be identified as style, consumption activities typically need to be perceived as deviating from a more or less coherent idea of the mainstream. Thus, Hebdige notes, it is a signifying practice where the novel assemblage of elements into style is a way of disrupting existing semiotic sign systems. This having been said, most would agree that also the mainstream has a way in which they assemble, modify, combine, and act toward consumer objects and activities that would have to be described as a style. In essence, it appears that one cannot not have a style. Whether a particular style is good or bad, interesting or boring, in fashion or out of fashion, or in essence stylish is, however, an entirely different question.

The word style has been in use in the English language for several hundred years and has typically been associated with a distinct manner of expression in writing or speech. This manner can either be formalized (as when an author is given a style guide to use correct formatting or tone of voice in contributing a text to a book, journal, or magazine) or it can be a personal manner of expression (as in the Hemingway style of writing, i.e., the basic grammar and the unvarnished descriptions). This distinction between formalized and personalized expressions of style is also prevalent in other key uses of the term—for example, when it points to a distinctive manner or custom of behaving or conducting oneself, or a particular manner or technique by which something is done, created, or performed. These latter uses are more akin to the use of the word in consumer culture instances.

Style expressions can also be viewed on a scale ranging from the idiosyncratic to the collective. On the latter end of the spectrum, we can imagine expressions such as the Mediterranean style of cooking, suggesting certain commonalities among a large collective. On a mesolevel, we can imagine the stylistic expressions of various subcultural groups, for example, punk style. On the microlevel, there are strictly personal expressions as when someone is suggested to have exquisite style rather than being a slave to fashion.