Inside Subculture the Postmodern Meaning of Style
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
- Publish date: 04/01/2000
Description:
What motivates people to dress in a manner that marks them out as different to the conventional norm? Is it true that, with dress, anything goes in our mix-and-march postmodern culture? Have easily recognizable, authentic subcultures imploded in a glut of ironic reversals and stylistic fragmentation? Does this supposed "post-subcultural" generation actively celebrate ephemerality. transience, and disposability, merely casting off and trying on one alternative identity after another in an ever-accelerating fashion frenzy?
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Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner. David Muggleton seeks to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both -- a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity, and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underling essence. He concludes that a Romantic libertarianism has permeated working-class culture and that the disanction between "individualistic" middle-class countercultures and "collectivist" working-class subcultures has been over-emphasized.
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