Inside Insurgency

What motivates people to dress in a manner that marks them out as different to the conventional norm? Is it true that, with dress, anything goes in our mix-and-match postmodern culture? Have easily recognizable, authentic subcultures imploded in a glut of ironic reversals and stylistic fragmentation? Does this supposed 'post-subcultural' generation actively celebrate ephemerality, transience, and disposability, merely casting off and trying on one alternative identity after another in an ever-accelerating fashion frenzy? Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner, David Muggleton seeks to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both - a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity, and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underlying essence. He concludes that a Romantic libertarianism has permeated working-class culture and that the distinction between 'individualistic' middle-class countercultures and 'collectivist' working-class subcultures has been over-emphasized.