OUAN501 - Subcultures:
Although our lecturer for that session was off and couldn't make it in to the lecture, we still had a very interesting time watching a series of six short films about Fred Perry, the fashion designer, and the way he has influenced fashion throughout the decades. I thought it was a great series and really enjoyed seeing how fashion has changed and how subcultures coexisted with one another... or fought with one another!
It went through the eras and featured talks from famous people such as Phil Jupitus, giving their take on how the fashion industry changed their lives and what subcultures they fit in with at the time. The films discovered the meaning behind the Teddy Boys - the Edwardian take offs of the 1950s, rockers, punks, mods, Northern and Southern Soul, ska, skinheads, scooter boys, ravers, Brit Pop culture, indies, and the legacy of house/acid music. I found that a lot of subcultures were heavily tied in with music, and although it is considered that there are no more original subcultures out there as most are either revived in some form or another, we still have groups such as emos, goths, chavs and all the rest in between that still conform to some extent or another.
However, subcultures used to be more than just what you wore and what music you listened to. Although most derived from genres of music and the people that listened to such, a lot of subcultures tried to at least have an impact on society in some way or another. Be it through political stance (punk/anarchism), beliefs, equality, economical factors (skinheads/working class) and so forth. Nowadays, the chance to change the world is in all of us, but few really have the drive to do it. Teens are getting lazier, the government is getting more controlling and there's little we seem to want to do about it... This is probably why we consider there to be no "real" subcultures anymore!
All in all, I find the idea of a subculture in itself very contradictory as you try and be different and stray from the norm only to popularise something "new". Consumerism gets a sniff of the new "trend" and sells it to the public who then abuse this by conforming to what was seen as unusual and unique, without understanding of what the cult actually stood for in the first place or why it was formed. It thus become "fashion" and dies out as it becomes mainstream.
