History of Fashion
Dick Hebdige’s article “Subculture: The Unnatural Break” poses the matter of the role of subculture in a conventional society. The article indicates that media is presenting subcultures such as punk, as threatening to the traditional societal conventions, to the generally accepted sense of morality, lifestyle or fashion. The arguments that the author uses vary from references to the members of subculture as different individuals that create semantic disorders to conversion and the erasure of the “other” to social norms.
The article depicts how media techniques are used to highlight a subculture as negative to social standards. Hebdige suggests that by mentioning and criticizing it vehemently media solely contributes to popularizing subcultures, even if in intended dismissive manners. The author explains that subcultures are considered as “symbolic challenges to a symbolic order” that grasps social attention specifically to the hysteria that propagates it. To exemplify, the author refers to real life events that have been manipulated by the press in order to generate a bad image upon the threatening subculture. Like this, the author refers to a media title “Victim of the Punk Rock Punch: The Boy Who Fall Fool of the Mob” that reflects a boy falling in a concert, exacerbating the gravity of the situation, in order to instigate families with traditional values against this current. This is the form of hysteria that the author speaks about.
However, although this type of hysteria has as effect the consolidation of a petite bourgeois that feels threatened by the existence of the “other” and intends to dissolve this other, another outcome of this hysteria is the fact that the punk subculture attracts more members. The subculture becomes integrated as a commodity form that results in the commercial exploitation of the subculture through music or fashion, and the ideological form, which signals the awareness of a moral panic. Therefore, the integration of the subculture occurs in two contrasting modes: either by acceptance and the exploitation of its commercial potential, either by ideological and moral resistance.
While it would seem that the ideological form is more dangerous for the subcultures, as it positions members of society with traditional values against the threatening subculture, criticizing or bantering it, it is actually the commodity form that poses a serious threat. Punk subculture is an expression of originality, of disrespecting the rules, of having an individuality, as depicted by the punk rock band Sex Pistols, which earn fame and are remunerated for their original, disrespectful behavior. When this behavior is exploited and the punk fashion tends to be exposed everywhere, or punk lifestyle tends to be displayed for the purpose of generating commercial attitudes, the originality and uniqueness get lost. Furthermore, the values of the punk culture are adjusted to the conventional morals, ignoring and in the end erasing the true essence of the subculture.
This is in fact the conversion, or the assimilation of the subculture into the accepted standards of mainstream culture. An example in this sense is Emi’s attempt to position Sex Pistols as a pop band, a socially accepted music style, in comparison with which punk was considered “noise”, as the proponent of its subculture. In this effort, Emi tried to diminish the real essence of Sex Pistols’ punk subculture, converging the band to conventionalism, yet failing to do so, as the band resisted the cultural assimilation.
Hebdige’s article raises a significant controversy regarding the role of mass media and commercial activities in repressing subcultures through vivid opposition or subtle assimilation. Through the arguments that refer to semantic disorder versus social conversion, the article indicates that the real threat does not come from subculture to cultural convention, but the other way around, as the sameness and the conventionalism threaten the individualism and originality in terms of behavior, lifestyle, morality or fashion.
Bibliography
Hebdige, Dick. “Subculture: The Unnatural Break” in Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen, 1979.
