The Subcultures Reader

“all of our contributors would probably agree that subcultures are groups of people that have something in commone with each other (i.e they share a problem, an interest, a practise) which distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other social groups.”

- Ken Gelder (Editor) 1997. The Subcultures Reader. Routledge

By Sarah Gill

Punk's Influence on Mainstream Fashion

- The most stylistic elements of punk (the "do it yourself" style creations) such as studded jackets, torn jeans, where the easiest elements exploit.

- Vivienne Westwood's designs fed back directly into the comercial market, intergrating the punk aesthetic into the society's culture.

- All these pieces of Westwood's are now created for the world of high fashion and a worth far more than the ideology of punk would allow. This is an example of "the commodity form" of intergration.

by James

Subculture : The Meaning of Style - Dick Mebdige - 1979

- Established that subcultures can be studied using semiotics, by considering it a language. At this point it cannot be interpreted by society because there are no pre-existing points of reference.

- There are many inital reactions to subcultures generally ranging from fear, to fasination, to amusement. The elements which attract the initial media attention are the most aesthetic and stylistic, and this is the beginings of the subcultures ideology degrading it begins to be understood by the population.

- As mainstream culture begins to learn more about the subculture it diffuses, and asymilates with the mainstream. Elements are extracted and exploited for commercial success and in doing so the subculture loses it originality and often their value systems (very evident in punk's "do it yourself" image being exploited to create a "punk look" seen commonly in mainstream fashion).

- The media can also choose to simply intergrate the subcultures elements, by finding points of "sameness" in order to domesticate it in order to make sense of it.

- The quest to understand the subculture inevitably ends in that subculture being intergrated into the mainstream culture, meaning the subculture is no longer seperate and no longer exist.

by James

Inside Subculture : The Postmodern Meaning of Style - David Muggleton - 2000

"The first pair are used in an epochal sense, with postmodernity conveying the idea of a shift from, or transformation of, modernity, such that we have made, or are in the process of making, a move to a new historical period or form of society."

"This historical focus should be kept in mind throughout this chapter, for my aim is to examine what implications there might be for subcultures if we are, indeed, moving towards a postmodern society. I intend to explore this theme, as it relates to both fashion in general and subcultural style more specifically, through examining the assertions of other writers and commentators on this topic."

"The idea seemed to me was never to fit in . . . and if you never fitted in, then there was never going to be any competition. Malcolm McLaren on the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock: ‘Mavericks’, (BBC Radio One, Feb. 1995) Have no rules...  I don’t have many friends, but the few I still have are worth keeping because of just that. Highly individualistic. Unable to fit cozily into systems." 

"These provide the necessary conceptual clarification to enable us to assess empirically the extent to which a sample of contemporary subculturalists display a postmodern sensibility."

- Indicates a differentiation from the pre-existant culture.

"Whereas images once reflected and represented reality, or even produced an ideological mystification of reality (as in the Marxist sense), the image now serves to distract us from the fact that there is no reality to which it seems to refer."

-  Showing that the mass social population have no way of interpreting these subcultures, as they are intially see nothing with which they are familiar, they have nothing that they can refer back to, other than it's differentiation from their own culture.


"Certainty and absolutism must be replaced by indeterminacy and difference. Baudrillard (1983b) theorizes how ‘information networks’ and media proliferation have brought about a transition from an ‘industrial order’ of mass production to a society premised on the reproduction of signs and images (ibid.: 100). Whereas images once reflected and represented reality, or even produced an ideological mystification of reality (as in the Marxist sense), the image now serves to distract us from the fact that there is no reality to which it seems to refer. Indeed, Baudrillard goes so far as to claim that free-floating signs reach a stage in which they refer only to each other: the image ‘bears no relation to any reality whatsoever"

- Focuses on how media outlets have the power to distort ideologies by choosing the most aesthetic and stylistic of "signs", to represent these subcultures.

"On the basis that such changes are occurring we can put forward two hypotheses. First, that group identifications (such as, I’m a punk; I’m a mod) would be problematized, and that subculturalists would not regard themselves in such specific terms. Second, that the fragmentation of both conventional and subcultural style has led to a de-differentiation (Lash 1990) of the subcultural– conventional divide, meaning that subculturalists would be unable to maintain this boundary through comparisons with conventional style."

- Showing the inevitable deconstruction of the subculture as it becomes analysed and intergratedinto mainstream culture.

by James

Punk Fanzine Design

   

The Punk Fanzine "Flipside" - Reflects the punk ideology of creating some minimal, by hand rather than using mass productive techniques. There is a large use of found images, reused typography, hand drawn elements and typewriter body copy. This internally created media does however lead to the ultimate diffusion of subculture as all media representation does.

by James

Hipster Documentary

 Stevegarvey (2008) hipster documentary, online video, accessed on 30/3/2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr77efMavEY&feature=related


by Toby

Subculture survey

For the project research I asked around a youth demographic of 18-22 year olds to fill out a short survey on general subculture and surprisingly the vast majority of them did.

1.     1. Britain has a rich history when it comes to youth subcultures but where do you think you fit? You could be a punk, a skater, emo or one of the many others or do you think you are a part of mainstream culture?

About half the people managed to assign themselves to a youth subculture a lot of these were varied and some assigned themselves to more than one subculture which leads me on to the people who mentioned that they didn’t want to say that they where mainstream one going as far as to just to say “I don’t want to label myself” which is probably a yearning not to be placed in the ‘boring’ mainstream in some attempt of youthful rebellion. On another interesting note one person answered with “not chav” this is him associating what he is by what he is not a clear way that subcultures are formed. The rest have reluctantly said they were mainstream and they all seemed the need to justify it as if it is an embarrassing secret.

2.     2. Would you agree that modern youth subcultures are an evolution of older ones or they are new and fresh with different ideals?

By an overwhelming majority most people believed that modern subcultures are evolutions of older ideas rather than fresh new ones, some also suggested that they were “cheap knock offs” of older ones. Most people suggest that the subcultures have changed due to change in society and technology.

3.     3. Do you think subcultures are still prevalent today?

Everybody bar two said that yes they are still prevalent in today’s world however a minority said that it is hardly compared to how it was in the past.

4.    4.  If so do you think they have the same impact as they did in the past, are you afraid of subcultures like punks or do you think they no longer threatening?

This question got a very inbetween answer of yes they are threatening but no ware near as much they were in the past. Some have suggested that the subculture chav has now taken the threatening role in society. Some then said that subcultures were now about fashion and hair not a political stance or the anger of youth.

5.    5.  Do you think subcultures are dying out, if so do you think this is because people are happy with society or have nothing they feel then need to rebel against?

Most people would say subcultures are not dying out however they differ on what they are doing, about half the people who agree that subcultures are not dying out and they will always have something to rebel against, some used the example of the student riots last year. The other half said they thought that it they don’t have things to rebel against and that subcultures have changed to be more of identity thing to do with the cloths they wear and their hair.

6.     6. What do you think subculture means?

To a pleasant surprise most people answered with a very accurate answer saying that they were groups of people who rebel against a mainstream culture usually with a cause on a political level. However there were a couple of people who got the answer very wrong, one even suggested that it was completely to do with music.

an example of a complete survey

By Toby

Hipster - The hipster in the mirror

What Was the Hipster? By Mark Greif, http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/ published 24/10/10 accessed on 5/4/2011

“Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparel, announced in August that “hipster is over” and “hipsters are from a certain time period.” Gawker proposed to substitute a new name for the hipster by fiat—approving, after some consideration, the term fauxhemian.”

“A key myth repeated about the hipster, by both the innocent and the underhanded, is that it has no definition.”

“The matrix from which the hipster emerged included the dimension of nineties youth culture, often called alternative or indie, that defined itself by its rejection of consumerism.”

“Un the nineties, the sociologist Richard Lloyd documented how what he called “neo-bohemia” unwittingly turned into something else: the seedbed for post-1999 hipsterism.”

“The neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

“Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else. The new young strangers acted, as people said then, “hipper than thou.””

“the White Hipster fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class “white trash.” “I love being white, and I think it’s something to be proud of,” Vice founder Gavin McInnes told the Times in 2003.”

“In culture, the Hipster Primitive moment recovered the sound and symbols of pastoral innocence with an irony so fused into the artworks it was no longer visible.”

“Where the White Hipster was relentlessly male, crowding out women from public view (except as Polaroid muses or SuicideGirls), the Hipster Primitive feminized hipster markers; one spoke now of headdresses and Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, not just male facial hair.”

“Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority. Usually this requires a fantasized censor who doesn’t want you to have cologne, or booze, or cars. But the censor doesn’t exist, of course, and hipster culture is not a counterculture.”

“Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core.”

“The most confounding element of the hipster is that, because of the geography of the gentrified city and the demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly anti-authoritarian youth countercultures.”

“Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture? To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. But there is something in this confusion that suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.”

“Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities.”

“In the U.K., American-patterned hipsters in Hackney and Shoreditch are said to be turning more toward an ethos of androgyny, drag, the queer.”

This is another article by Mark Greif who seems to be an authority on hipster culture writing about how he feel that hipster is now dead and has been since early 2010. In it he talks about the evolution of hipsters, where they came from and what they might of stood for, talking about where they stood as a subculture and coming to the conclusion that it is for one thing not a counter culture. He refers to their influences and why they came into existence and then talking about their evolution from what he called white hipsters to the hipster primitive. Towards the end he asks if hipster can be revived like after its near death in 2003. Overall this article makes for a very interesting read and goes deep into the ethos of the hipster however the explanations where longwinded making it hard to find short and snappy quotations.

By Toby

Hipster - Meet the global scenester: He's hip. He's cool. He's everywhere

Meet the global scenester: He's hip. He's cool. He's everywhere by Tim Walker

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/woman/fashion-beauty/meet-the-global-scenesters-hip-cool-and-everywhere-13941921.html

Thursday, 14 August 2008 accessed on 30/3/2011

“Today's scenesters all wear the same clothes and accessories, listen to the same sounds, ride the same bicycles, and read the same magazines, e-mailouts and style blogs.”

“For a time it seemed it would be a simple matter of shifting from London to Tokyo. But instead, street style is everywhere and in places you'd never have guessed it would be."

“a succession of styles from the past half-century, patched together to form a single, strangely familiar whole. There's a bit of Eurotrash here, some British punk there, a swatch of Asian minimalism, and a sizeable off-cut of blue-collar chic from both sides of the Atlantic.”

“American Apparel is an archetype for the globalisation of "cool". The retail chain was founded in California in 1997 with an outsider ethic.”

“The further its global reach stretches, the more easily the company can study and copy street style, before repackaging it and selling it back to the originators of that style, with an American Apparel label attached.”

“Today's music scene is a global swapshop. One of the coming bands of this year, for instance, are Johannesburg's Blk Jks, whose style choices include the global scenester's familiar Elvis Costello "dork" glasses, 1970s ski vests, vintage Nikes and, yes, skinny jeans.”

“It's no coincidence that American Apparel's often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look, nor that Vice photographer Terry Richardson is the principal photographer for Uniqlo's in-house magazine,”

“Making fun of the global scenesters is futile, for they love nothing more than to mock themselves.”

“Everything a scenester does is rendered in air quotes: ironic moustaches, ironic trucker caps, faux-offensive Urban Outfitters T-shirts, white guys with afros, or musical acts with names like Does It Offend You, Yeah?”

“The internet has been a key factor in the globalisation of hip. Through mailouts and blogs, the tropes of eclectic style tribes the world over are quickly integrated into a single street style. The keffiyeh, once a signifier of solidarity with Palestine, now signifies nothing but cool. The fixed-wheel bike is now the global scenester's favourite ride. China's cheap Holga camera, once a well-kept secret among professional photographers hoping to achieve that lo-fi look, is now an essential urban accessory.”

"Trends aren't transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be," explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. "They're now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream."

“Not even geopolitics is beyond the boundaries of cool for a global scenester: there's a vague pro-organic, anti-Bush sentiment uniting them all.”

“As this "borrowing and referencing" takes place not in capitals of cool like London but on an international scale, via the internet, the result is that same brand of individuality is sold, worn and celebrated the world over, simultaneously.”

This article talks about the hipster scene in London but describing the streets at the hub of the subculture in that city. Then the article goes on to talk about how companies sell hipsters own Ideas back to them and how though the internet a trend can cover the world in hours.

By Toby

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, Douglas Haddow , 29 Jul 2008  accessed 30/3/2011

“"So... this is a hipster party?" I ask the girl sitting next to me. She's wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.”

“"Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!"

"Are you a hipster?"

"Fuck no," she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.”

“But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of "counter-culture" have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the "Hipster."”

“A culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.”

“"Hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.”

“Such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.”

“With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of "hipsterdom" is left wide open for attack.”

“It is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon”

“It is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster.”

“Hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.”

“Hipsterdom is the first "counterculture" to be born under the advertising industry's microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations.”

“Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion.”

“Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.”

“The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.”

This Adbusters article has a very strong opinion about hipsters from the outset and follows the writer’s observations of a hipster night out. It seems a little loathing from a slanted perspective however he makes some valid points.


by Toby