Style is an unspoken language of identity. But what do things like clothes and hairdos mean? How should we interpret a mohawk as opposed to a beehive, pedalpushers versus intentionally ripped jeans, ska music versus hardcore? Dick Hebdige thinks he has...
[more]Style is an unspoken language of identity. But what do things like clothes and hairdos mean? How should we interpret a mohawk as opposed to a beehive, pedalpushers versus intentionally ripped jeans, ska music versus hardcore? Dick Hebdige thinks he has the answer.
Hebdige's slim 1979 monograph "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" taught a whole generation how to read personal fashion. But as the book's title suggests, Hebdige was mainly interested in style as a form of subversion. His work focuses on marginal groups -- punks, mods, Rastafarians -- whose style he sees as a statement of "refusal," of resistance and opposition to the dominant order.
For Hebdige, an entire battle over cultural meaning is waged at the surface of people's bodies. His case studies of English youth cultures describe how such groups attack hegemony -- not merely with negative statements, but with the clothes they wear and the images they project. Appearances, for Hebdige, harbor a hidden dialectic. Indeed, ordinary objects -- safety pins, a tube of vaseline, motor scooters -- when appropriated by a subculture, become salvos in the war of minority against majority.
The humble safety pin is Hebdige's most famous example. It is, of course, a domestic object employed by working-class families to pin together old or awkward clothing. But when punks insert safety pins into their ears and cheeks, these simple objects become symbols of deviation. Displaced from their quotidian context, they parody the culture from which they are derived. Safety, utility, and modesty give way to danger, wastefulness, and deliberate outrageousness.
The strategy employed by subcultures in this struggle is one of appropriation, displacement, and assemblage. Just as dada artists created disjointed aggregates of images and texts severed from their everyday contexts, subcultures, Hebdige claims, create their style by appropriating objects or signs from the mainstream. The punks epitomized this -- they cut things up and pinned them together on their leather jackets. So did the Rastafarians, whom Hebdige discusses in "Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music" (1987). In their hands, a collage of Ethiopian political icons, Hebrew religious symbols, and British pop-music references becomes a distinct style expressly rejecting colonialism and racism.
Hebdige shows that style does not sit still. It is a locus in which reversals and modulations of cultural meanings constantly take place. Revolutionary gestures can be reabsorbed and sanitized by mainstream culture. Subcultures, therefore, like guerrilla armies, must stay on the move; they must reinvent themselves and find new ways to subvert the tools of the majority. Hebdige continues to report from the front lines and interpret each skirmish.
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