It may seem a bit too easy to characterise British youth cultures in terms of fashion styles. Nevertheless, dress codes are obviously crucial keys to understanding how the lines are drawn between different identities in
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Britain. After all, the way that we dress can serve either to confirm or to subvert various facets of our identities, such as our gender, race, class, and age. Clothes also reflect our perceptions of the historical epoch in which we live – how we relate to the cultural mood of the day. The postmodern preoccupations of the last decades of the twentieth century, for example, are linked to nostalgia, pastiche and what might be better described as kinds of ‘fusion’ or as cultural hybridity (mixing different styles of fashion, music, or anything else). Contemporary fashions conspicuously play upon these cultural themes, and styles from every previous decade have re-surfaced to evoke the spirit (or Zeitgeist) of contemporary Britain. ‘Now’
is in many ways a recycling of previous Zeitgeists.
One way of thinking about different subcultural groupings within young British fashion is in terms of class identities. Subcultures such as punks, hippies, crusties, bikers, and goths have tended – in one way or another – to challenge the traditional values of smart and respectable dress.
On the other hand, mods, soul boys (and girls), teds, skinheads, and home-boys have usually emphasised a ‘sharper’ style of dress, though of course in diverse ways. This opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘scruffy’ clothes bears some relation to class allegiances in so far as dress codes which place greater value on clothes ‘looking new’ are more often adopted by working-class young people, while scruffier ‘bohemian’ styles are more likely to have middle-class wearers. But often, subcultural styles of dress confront and confound mainstream expectations about people’s position in the social structure, especially in the cities.
The above is too simplistic a formula to apply to all UK youth subcul-tures, especially as these styles in themselves are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and most young people, in any case, are likely to draw on a range of possible influences. The enormous increase in the student population, for instance, is bound to affect the class delineations of subcultural style, as many more working-class young people enter a terrain which had previ-ously been a middle-class preserve.
As Dick Hebdige points out in his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, black subcultures have been a central factor in the formation of many white working-class subcultural styles such as that of mods (short for moderns). Both Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American influences have been critical in shaping British youth culture since the 1950s, not least because more and more young people in Britain are growing up in multi ethnic, cross-cultural environments. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Afro-Caribbean Rastafarian style influenced both black and white youth subcultural fashion, with red, green, and gold Ethiopian colours commonly featuring on T-shirts, hats, badges, and jackets. Today, more than ever, black subcultural styles tend to lead the way in British street fashion, espe-cially those derived from the Afro-American Rap scene: the ‘home-boy’
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look of very baggy jeans, big hooded jackets, and baseball caps is almost ubiquitous among teenage boys, especially the under sixteens. ‘Clubwear’
styles (for example tight lycra, shiny fabrics and bright colours) also seem to be influenced strongly by black street fashions. Perhaps most signifi-cantly, Asian youth culture in Britain seems to draw very much on Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean subcultural styles (as in the music of Apache Indian). The influence of the European club scene has also affected British styles, as clubs in the UK often try to recreate the atmosphere of Ibiza or Ayia Napa, and the ambient sounds of European bands such as Air (amid the eclectic Anglophone Euro sounds of, say, Aqua, Daft Punk, and Kings of Convenience) have eroded the deep-seated British aversion to pop music from the Continent, previously denigrated as ‘Europop’ (the title of a parodic song by the Divine Comedy). Identifications and cultural alle-giances in Britain are now much more complex, in other words, than is suggested by traditional models of assimilation.
When considering what people wear, we need also to think about where they go, as the two are usually connected. In 1994, 34 per cent of adults in Britain visited a pub at least once a week. However, for young
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F I G U R E 4 . 1 Black London punk
people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, the figure was much higher at 64 per cent. So, it is perhaps not surprising that UK pubs seem to be becoming more overtly geared towards a youth clientele, as increasing numbers of them, and particularly pub chains, introduce competitions, quizzes, and games areas. Nevertheless, pubs still have a unique status in British culture as places where people of different ages and, to a lesser extent, different classes, are likely to socialise together, particularly with the introduction of sports screens to show live football matches. British soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders have long played on the pub’s function as a place where lots of different kinds of people could plausibly meet up. This, in turn, has led to complaints from televi-sion monitoring groups that soap operas might encourage viewers to drink more alcohol, because characters are so often portrayed having a drink in their ‘local’.
Since the 1990s, it has been argued, clubs rather than pubs are the focus of many young people’s social lives. The growth of the ‘rave’ scene in Britain (which began with ‘Acid House’ parties in the late 1980s) has 1111
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F I G U R E 4 . 2 Female London punk
meant that dancing has again become a central activity, as it had been in the ‘dance halls’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the discos of the 1970s.
In contrast to these earlier dance scenes, though, alcohol has tended to be a peripheral element of contemporary UK dance culture. Instead, rave puts much more emphasis on taking drugs such as Ecstasy, the effects of which tend to be cancelled out by alcohol. People dancing constantly for several hours are more likely to drink fluids, especially bottled water, to avoid dehydration and to restore energy levels, which no doubt accounts for the cultish popularity of the soft drink Lucozade in the rave scene. Traditional drinks have also re-marketed themselves to appeal to a new generation, and so the latest Lucozade adverts are cartoons featuring Lara Croft (a far cry from the medicinal advertising in the 1970s that simply stressed ‘Lucozade aids recovery’). Lucozade now also comes in a variety of types for different lifestyles: Lucozade Energy, Lucozade Sport, Lucozade Low Calorie and Lucozade Solstis.
At the outset, a key element in the appeal of raves was their illegality:
events where thousands of people would come together were often publi-cised by enigmatic flyers, and by messages transmitted on pirate radio stations such as Kiss. The countercultural status of raves could be compared to ‘blues parties’ or ‘shebeens’, which became particularly popular in Afro-Caribbean communities in the 1980s. Like raves, these parties blurred the boundaries between private gatherings and public events in so far as they tended to be held in ‘unofficial’ or even squatted venues, with entrance by informally sold tickets or invitations. Like raves, blues parties were associ-ated both with a specific type of music (reggae and ragga), played through enormous sound systems, and with drugs (cannabis) more than with alcohol – though cans of beer or other alcohol would usually be sold or included in the entrance price.
Significantly, though, raves were one of the key targets of the Criminal Justice Act (1994), and this no doubt partly accounts for the decrease in their popularity now, their place increasingly being taken by big (‘legit-imate’) clubs such as Cream and The Ministry of Sound. More than anything, however, these shifts in the popularity of different venues reflect the fast-moving, changeable nature of British youth culture: new scenes or styles quickly transmute from ‘subculture’ to ‘mainstream’ trends, and with equal rapidity they also fade from favour or disappear altogether. This ebb and flow in subcultural activity informs most young people’s cultural identities in one way or another, but this is by no means to suggest that everybody’s lives follow the same patterns. For instance, even though clubs and parties might well represent a central (and glamorous) social activity in 1990s Britain, many young people on a ‘night out’ will still often ‘start the proceedings’ by visiting a pub. The more traditional activity of ‘pub crawls’ – on which lots of different pubs are visited in one evening – also
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persists in Britain, particularly among students, and groups of ‘laddish young men’ (such as the members of a rugby team or the groom and his mates on a ‘stag’ party).
Since the 1980s, traditional features of pubs such as bar billiards have often been superseded by CD or video juke boxes, and wide-screen televi-sions tuned to MTV, or Sky Sport. And yet, whether or not loud music is played in pubs, most of them still retain the same function, especially in the countryside where pubs are not vying for clientele in the way they are in the cities. The pub remains the primary leisure institution for white British culture but is generally much less popular among Afro-Caribbeans and Asians. It could be argued that pubs are bound up with British ideas of ‘rites of passage’, in so far as a young person’s ‘first legal drink in a pub’
is often treated as a landmark. Growing concern about under-age drinking has meant that more attention is paid to young pub customers providing proof that they are over eighteen, and the major companies that run pubs have introduced their own ID cards. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that, since the late 1970s, increased emphasis has been put on eighteenth birthday celebrations, rather than twenty-first birthdays.
In large cities, especially northern ones such as Liverpool, Manchester, or Newcastle, there is a whole ritual which revolves around
‘going out on the town’ on Friday and Saturday nights. Long queues form as hundreds of people gather around the pubs, clubs, and wine bars – young women often dressed extremely glamorously in thin-strapped, backless evening dresses, gauzy tunics, or very short skirts, and young men in more casual (but nevertheless immaculate) shirts and trousers. In the context of
‘a night out on the town’, the stereotype of the British love of queuing acquires another significance. The more popular clubs, for instance, some-times hire ‘queue spotters’ who look out for particularly stylishly dressed
‘punters’ – the best dressed may well be allowed to go to the front of the queue, while those guilty of certain ‘fashion crimes’ (for example wearing white socks or the ‘wrong’ kind of shoes) may not be allowed in at all.
Like the film lines curling around corners in the heyday of cinema going, these queues of clubbers function as a kind of social scene, a place to meet your friends, to flirt, or to compete with your peers. Young people also might end their evening in another queue, waiting to buy chips or a kebab, or standing in line for a taxi.
This kind of weekend spectacle is not often regarded as being part of any specific subculture, apart from what might be broadly described as
‘clubbing’, and yet it is still governed by a distinct set of codes – for example, in many cities, Friday night is girls’ and boys’ night out but Saturday night is for couples. One of the most striking aspects of these weekly events is the disregard most of the young people appear to have for the weather – the rule seems to be that jackets or coats are not worn even 1111
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on freezing winter nights (this is also a question of money as it is a luxury to buy an impressive coat or jacket which will only be ‘checked’, hung away, at the club). Perhaps most noticeable, though, is the fact that men and women tend to go out not with boyfriends or girlfriends, but with their
‘mates’ of the same sex. For women especially, this seems to be an import-ant element in the way they choose to dress – the flamboyance and overtly sexual nature of the outfits that many young women wear are apparently in some way legitimated by the fact that they are dressing up ‘for fun’, rather than explicitly to attract men. Indeed, it is often said that women on these occasions are ‘dressing up’ for other women, that an integral part of the ritual is be identified as part of a female subculture and to gain the approval of other members of that social group. None of these so-called
‘rules’ or codes of dress is clear-cut, however.