Written by Klara Engholm Poulsen
Subculture is a term which are related to youth cultures (Hebdige, 1979) and when you look up the word in the Cambridge Dictionary it explains the term this way: “The way of life, customs, and ideas of a particular group of people within a society that are different from the rest of that society” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.). It means that people buy clothes to differ themselves from others. Today we use the term in a different way than we did in the 70s where punks as subculture was dominating the society and it was clearly to see who they belonged through their appearance of their clothes, hair, and make-up. Because of social media subculture is today more difficult to define and it can therefore be challenging to assess a subculture through a person’s appearance because we look more like each other and get a lot of inspiration from social media. We decide ourselves who we want to look like, and we can look like a rapper one day and look like a metal fan the next day. Subculture has changed but the questions is how? And how can social media and overconsumption have a take on this change? These are the questions I will try to answer in this article with some help from Dick Hebdige’s article: “Style as Intentional Communication in Subculture” (Hebdige, 1979). Social media and Instagram A platform like Instagram e.g., have a big influence on mange people’s style because we constantly get images thrown into our heads of other people’s clothes and how they style it.
We even stole some inspiration from the punk subculture by pierce ourselves. This is also the reason why we buy more and more, and we can shift our wardrobe as much as we want to. The Danish influencer Emilie Lilja is tattooed many places on her body and have a lot of piercings which we in the older days would put her into a subculture like punk. But this is not the case today and she is also wearing a glitter dress which is much more feminine so she it is clearly that she has found inspiration for different type of styles and subculture. Dick Hebdige writes in his article that subculture is a way people who go against the gain of mainstream culture whose principal defining characteristic. (Hebdige, 1979). But as I wrote formerly in the article, we look more like each other because we find our inspiration on the same platform and therefore, we buy the same things. This means that our consumption does not divide us into different groups and does that mean that subculture has become mainstream? This does not have to be the case because maybe we can argue that all of us is a part of the same subculture after social media have fragmented the old media and everyone now have become mainstream. We steal inspiration from each other, and different styles where we buy a lot of stuff, we do not need to look like each other. Bibliografi
Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.). Subculture. Retrieved November 4, 2022, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/subculture
Hebdige, D. (1979). "Style as Intentional Communication". Subculture: The Meaning of Style.