Alice in the Consumer Wonderland: West German case studies in gender and consumer culture

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1970s, theorists of youth subcultures in Britain have appropriated the notion of ‘style’ from marketers of teenage fashion commodities, and mobilised it for their studies of oppositional subcultures in the post-war period. Recalling a tradition of cultural studies which reaches back to Richard Haggart’s Uses of Literacy (Haggart, 1958), early analysts of subcultural deviance and opposition1 seem implicitly to share his distaste for the plastic glamour of commercialised youth culture; their gaze falls rather on visible subversions of dominant forms. The discordant notes sounded by Teds, rockers, mods, rastas or punks are seen to be pitched against the harmony of mass consumer culture; appropriating commodities from fashion, music and media industries, subcultural youths reassemble them into symbolic systems of their own which, if only at the moment of their birth, strike chords of disenchantment, rebellion and resistance. Like the phenomena which they examine, the analyses themselves are founded on a number of unspoken oppositions: conformity and resistance, harmony and rupture, passivity and activity, consumption and appropriation, femininity and masculinity

People say ... well, what don’t they say about teenagers?! They start with the accusation that we have no manners or sense of good behaviour, and that we′re hopelessly lacking in all religious belief. Then we are told off, either for dressing too sloppily, or looking too old for our age ... ‘Either’, we are told, ‘you run around like tramps in floppy jackets buttoned up at the back and drainpipe trousers which are far too tight— or else you slavishly follow the latest fashion trends’. We would like for once to give our point of view ... We teenagers have our own style. And that’s what makes many people see red.

(Advertisement for ‘Triumph’ underwear, Bravo magazine, no.42, 1958)