Subculture

Subcultures are groups with shared features that enable them to be distinguished from both the parent culture and the dominant culture from which they emerge. We may speak in social terms of a youth subculture or a working-class subculture and so forth, but it is the cultural norms, values, and symbolic practices of its members that give it expression. The focal concern with consumer culture is central to Max Weber's notion of “styles of life,” according to which consumption is of the conspicuous type and gives rise to distinctions based on status. Subcultural exclusivity, however, is usually achieved by members defining themselves in opposition to dominant sets of tastes. Subcultures are prevalent in industrially developed consumer societies, although most literature has been relevant to the United States, Britain, and Australia, often in the colonial context of migration to these countries.

The subculture concept became current in academic circles in the mid-twentieth century, when it was employed in American ethnographic studies of criminal and deviant groups, from juvenile street gangs to jazz musicians. Nonetheless, with clothing and physical adornment being the most visible markers of consumption, the concept can be applied retrospectively to two forms of oppositional dress that emerged in the eighteenth century as part of a distinctively modern and Western consumer culture. The soberly understated dress sense of the male bourgeois was taken to extreme forms of fastidiousness by the Regency dandy who favored the refined restraint of plain cloth and starched linen. By contrast, the middle-class bohemian was romantic and overtly [Page 1394]flamboyant. Over the past two centuries, bohemians have occupied the creative center of many major cities. Their forms of sartorial dissent range from early ethnic exoticism—highly colored turbans, scarves, shawls, kaftans, and flowing robes—through to the black sweaters and jeans of the existentially inspired 1950s beatnik.

Late-nineteenth-century Britain noted the presence of a troublesome teenage subculture, the “hooligan.” An Australian equivalent of the same period was the Larrikin. A uniform of large boots with bell-bottomed trousers was worn with a broad, buckled, leather belt, while a muffler or scarf and peaked cap worn over a donkey-fringe haircut completed the ensemble. The most visibly “spectacular” forms of youthful sartorial dissent, however, were those predicated on a post-1945 teenage leisure market for fashion, music and magazines, coffee bars, scooters, dance halls, and the like. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, England, theorized in the 1970s from a Marxist perspective how “spectacular” subcultures were formed by working-class youth creatively appropriating and recontextualizing such commodities to connote new, oppositional, meanings: a process known as bricolage. The resulting “look” was understood to be a coded form of resistance to the dominant culture. Thus, the CCCS adopted a form of semiotic analysis whereby subcultures such as teddy boys, mods, skinheads, and punks could be decoded, that is, read like a language, to reveal the hidden or latent meanings of the style.

The fastidious fashion sense of the early 1960s mods, with their two-tone mohair suits and sartorial obsession with such details as optimum cuff length, number of vents, and correct number of buttons, can thereby be read as a way of upwardly bridging the gap between a dream of affluent consumerism and the mundane reality of their working-class existence. By contrast, the skinheads of the same decade looked temporally backward and socially downward. Their proletarian image of cropped hair, collarless granddad shirts, braces, jeans, and workmen's Dr. Martens boots enacted a symbolic reassertion of a traditional working-class culture correctly perceived to be under threat. In a famous example of this form of analysis, the 1970s punks were seen to employ everyday utility objects such as plastic dustbin liners, safety pins, and dog collars in conjunction with customized, ripped, torn, and graffiti-covered T-shirts and items of school uniforms to connote chaos and meaningless, all in homological harmony with the punk ideology of anarchy.

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