IndexStreetwearQuestionnaireMy brand and what I'm doingConclusionBobby Hundreds, the founding father of The Hundreds, stated that "streetwear is a culture, not just a product". A subculture is a group that often has beliefs or interests that vary with those of the larger culture, usually involving recognizable tastes in fashion and music. Many subcultures also despise and reject the mainstream and the commercialization of the majority. Subcultures are able to strengthen and intensify because of the need for people to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves, particularly in young people. It is because young people are a very particular target market that many brands/companies have taken notice and have started to impose and profit from the subculture's musical and fashion tastes. This can often lead to the downfall of the subculture's original intentions and the complete extinction of the group. In summary, a subculture is a group that breaks away from mainstream society and adapts to the ideologies and preferences of some people. I'm researching and writing about this topic because I'm very interested in subcultures, ever since I was a child with a father heavily involved in the punk scene I've always enjoyed looking at culture and the way it behaves. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Another factor that gave me interest such as skateboarding and the streetwear scene which is probably one of the biggest subcultures today through the means of big consumerism and exorbitant prices. Doing this research will also give me an in-depth idea of ​​how I can involve my brand in being part of a streetwear subculture that we see with companies like Off-White, McQ, Palace and Supreme dominating the scene today, but without high price tags or in a way that would prove beneficial to others. This essay is about how fashion and design influence and take influence from subcultures and also focuses on how subcultures adapt through time and social changes from the 1970s to the present day, mainly focusing on punk and today's subcultures. Punk The punk subculture is believed to have been established in England. After the Second World War, England had experienced severe economic decline and enormous social disruption. Punk had a major influence from teddy boys and rockers. Conservative elements of British society rejected the subcultural style of left-wing movements and politics of the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the British economy was stuck in the doldrums and unemployment, especially among young people, was fast becoming an epidemic. British punks showed before everyone the sense of disappointment, desperation and failure that many young people felt in their bodies. Bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash suddenly became the hub of a new British subculture that highlighted the chaos, ugliness and outrage of British culture in the 1970s. Punk was chaos. The chaos became extremely evident in everything the punks had to deal with, from their behaviors, to their aggressive attitudes and clothing styles. Punk was a culture against the social imprisonment of some people as the working class which probably started the whole punk culture. One of its main causes was the rejection of the mainstream, corporate enterprise and its values. It continued to evolve its ideology, punk embraced a wide range of anti-racist and anti-sexist belief systems. Although the opinions of punks werestrongly left-wing, they also had right-wing views, such as no remorse, and apolitical views such as being misfits and not following the order. Punks wore anything that would make them look different. The Sex Pistols coined the slogan that summed up the British punk movement as a whole: No Future. While the hippies and flower children of the '60s sang about the coming of a new era of peace and love, the punks screamed about the apocalypse, decay and failure. In his seminal analysis of British subcultures in the 1970s, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige writes of punk: "Dressed in chaos, they produced noise in the quietly orchestrated crisis of everyday life in the 1970s." The pandemonium, obscenity and transgression created by the subcultural style of punk outraged conservative British society, while being capitalized on by record companies and the culture industry. Many punks fell out of love with bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash, viewing them as sellouts and rock stars who had conformed to society's norms by accepting such recording contracts. Punk Fashion Punk fashion was a countermovement and reaction against the hippie ways of the late sixties like the waves, rockets, drapes, peace and love clothes that everyone loved. Punk came along and demolished your sense of style with super tight jeans, leather jackets, ripped t-shirts, sweat and rage. “The smooth lines have been replaced by sharp cuts; 15-minute prog-rock jams hit by two-minute distorted blasts. Punk fashion featured very limited color and most clothing was black and white, often with flashes of communist red or union flags printed on the jackets. Vivienne Westwood One of the major contributors to punk's iconic look was Vivienne Westwood, a "punk guru." Vivienne met Malcolm Mclaren, an art student and future manager of the Sex Pistols. Through Mclaren, Vivienne began creating jewelery in parallel, this was the first time she was introduced to a new world of creative freedom and shown the power art had in the political landscape. “I connected with Malcolm as someone who opened doors for me,” Westwood said. “I mean, he seemed to know everything I needed at the time.” In 1971, Mclaren opened a shop at 430 Kings Road in London and began filling it with Westwood clothes and jewellery. The name of this store remained in almost constant fluctuation, changing five times, even as the store managed to prove itself as an important fashion center for the punk movement. When Mclaren became manager of the Sex Pistols, it was Westwood's designs that were used to dress the band and help give it its identity and kick-started the style that the punk movement would follow for years to come. Many people call Westwood the pioneer of the movement punk giving it the look needed to represent exactly what The Clash stood for at the end of '. In the 1970s, the biggest punk band in the world was The Clash, The Clash provided musical experimentation and showed the rest of the world that punk rock could consist of songs longer than two minutes and use more than just three chords. The Clash had it all Despite the urgency and importance of the Sex Pistols, however, the musical differences between the Clash and the Sex Pistols were enormous. The Clash, although they don't have very elegant instrumentalists, create much better music than the Pistols. The music they made is wild, the songs, full of menace and challenge, never intended to threaten. They are rather about anger and desperation, violence as a condition rather than a prescription. The Clash sang straight and spoke for a generation ofworking-class teenagers cut off from the social mainstream and who were also disaffected with the smug, comfortable sounds of most contemporary pop. The biggest challenge The Clash faced was that they failed to maintain their position as rebellious and anti-corporate while earning £1 million a year, leaving them stuck in a situation they couldn't really get out of. many hardcore punk fans abandoned them. How Subcultures Formed Subcultures, especially in the UK, commonly form in times of social change and austerity, usually inflicted by right-wing conservatives, this has given way to many subcultures seen in the UK, however, the first the truly well-known subculture was that of the Teddy Boys. Media containing music and films from the US were brought to the UK, this gave teenagers who for the first time had money in their pockets to spend it on something that made them feel like they could belong to a group and also create a uniform that was individual to them and that people could search and know which group or subculture they belonged to. Now that the military was out of the equation due to the eradication of conscription, for the first time especially teenage boys began to care more about their appearance, this created a gateway for marketing and capacity for companies to target specific age groups and groups, this has also helped create niche groups and allow people to start developing their own individual styles with expressions of freedom. The Teddy Boys uniform was instrumental in proving that a man could, in essence, be a peacock. It was about rejecting things around you like new American influences while keeping things intrinsically British. The uniform most commonly consisted of a draped jacket and creeper brothel (heeled shoes), they used every opportunity available to use accessories and make themselves more striking. It was an Edwardian style inspired by the officers of the guards, "the quintessential English aristocrat". The Teddy boy had a sharp look that the working class parodied with pink socks or lining in the jacket along with huge pompadour hairstyles to almost mock the upper class. taking their uniform and subverting it by trying to “mess up” the class system. “You couldn't change your home or your classroom but you could change your topics.” Working class culture was about a very rigorous and carefully rehearsed outlook. Rockers wore leather jackets, t-shirts with lace-up vests, they had motorbikes that gave themselves a very utilitarian look, taking American culture from films like The Wild Ones and using it in English. The rockers were the first to create a real generation gap by wearing oil-covered jeans, big boots and dirty leather jackets, with parents starting to ask questions like: "What the hell are you listening to?". The media is crucial to the formation of subcultures: it gives people a variety of ideas and inspiration for clothing from people they've never even met. However, the media's role in creating subcultures is very mixed, as they are always hungry for the next teenager. sensation especially if they manage to couple it with violence, like the mods fighting rockers on the seafront or portraying punks as completely destructive, it is clear that they enjoy doing it, but this has also given government administrations the opportunity to point the finger at finger and say they don't agree with what is happening and want to try to prevent it from escalating further before the movementyou gain more traction, however this is just promotion in most cases and gives the movement an epic boost in popularity which is also not what the movement could have wanted, going from being niche, elitist and exclusive to suddenly incredibly popular , this can eventually kill the subculture. Today, in modern society, it is easy to argue that subcultures have no chance of creating friction without being immediately shut down and eliminated. They don't even take off before being taken for a ride by consumerism and social media without the possibility of a small niche group actually forming. “There are very limited factors that we can consider unique to the culture and time we are in now that make it almost virtually impossible to succeed in creating an authentic subculture.” It's also impossible to ignore the instant gratification that the consumer desperately craves, leaving even less room for subcultures like fast fashion to exist, provided by brands around the world, from Topman and H&M to Supreme and Palace, style changes so rapidly now almost every season that doesn't give enough time to allow a subculture to evolve with us, consumers become almost vultures and always want new things on the market. Now we know what we want and we want it as soon as possible. With brands becoming more and more important in our lives, whether due to extremely high demand like Supreme with hordes of people queuing outside stores and refreshing laptops at 11am every morning or companies like Apple with their incredible quantity of advertising that is simply impossible not to see it becomes quite clear that we as consumers can create a kind of culture with the power in our hands giving us the freedom of choice of what to do can become more powerful than any advertising, because without our will any brand it can easily fade. This culture that is created, however, cannot be considered a subculture like those we have seen in the past because it lacks the opposition, struggles and rebellion of those who previously wanted to change the world for what they saw fit. Using the brands we see and wear combined with social media allows us to connect and see what people are currently wearing and constantly doing, this gives us the opportunity to make friends with people on the other side of the planet with just the click of a button pulsating, but it also means that trends can die out just as quickly, leaving them to those... trends. Subcultures aren't given enough time to grow naturally, meaning the newly discovered subgenre is suddenly all over Facebook, Twitter, and exploding in a club by the following Saturday. The real question is how is this happening, and it's as easy as: if you have a question ask Google, if you heard a song you like you would use Shazam, if you want to talk to your friends now you have Messenger, Snapchat, messages and that's the thing that social lives now exist on social media, it makes it rather ironic that, through the easy accessibility of a subculture, it is now harder than ever for them to take off. We also need to consider whether subcultures have lost the shock factor they once had, like the way teddy boys distorted the class system, the way punks and skinheads shaved their hair. It's not as exciting to know that our parents have already done it all. Subcultures live on in some forms, whether people grew up immersed in that subculture and are more than happy to continue pushing to keep it alive, or bands that still carry some of the core ethics and values ​​of the subcultures we've seen . in the past. It's more thanclear to see that northern soul is still active in some scattered forms in clubs like Soul Shack and Stables soul club. Furthermore, it is not difficult to find influences from rock in bands like Arctic Monkeys and Imagine Dragons, and also bands like Kaiser Chiefs, Destruction Unit and Downtown Boys all try to help push punk forward in their own way, to keep it in life. bands like Green Day imitating past bands like The Clash. But subcultures don't just require style and music, they need the driving force behind them which is the people, and the people need a reason to react. But now we live in an era where incredibly horrible information and events spread through our cell phones, laptops and Ipads at an incredible rate, everything now seems to happen too quickly, we can have tragic world events and a week later no one cares this generation of people. information processed quickly has no apathy for the events around it, we are all guilty of things like this, seeing a person having to sleep on the street should be heartbreaking and we should naturally want to help people but we are all willing to ignore it and keep walking , we show no concern for those around us and always assume that they have done it to themselves through horrible means, even though that's usually not the reality. And if we are people who can't unite and help each other first, how can we do it? Expect to unite and fight against social and political issues when we are guilty of being just as ignorant as the people sitting in the big chairs.StreetwearLo Streetwear has a distinctive visual identity and also has ties to the hip-hop/rap scene, but that doesn't make it a subculture because "streetwear means nothing more than brand and product." Streetwear doesn't fight any political issues and seems to be happy with the way things are. Skinheads had working class pride and represented a rejection of the British class system. Punks opposed everything that polite society deemed right and appropriate. By taking an active and public stand against prevailing social values, subcultures offer an alternative and encourage others to do the same. Streetwear, on the other hand, may represent an underground approach to fashion but that doesn't separate it from mainstream values. The central pillar of streetwear is not really sneakers or clothes, but consumption. “Brands cannot survive without profiting from their products, and streetwear cannot exist without the brands that comprise it. Streetwear drives consumption, which is the beating heart of consumer capitalism. As such, streetwear does not contradict prevailing values, it represents them. “Realistically, streetwear is actually a market segment rather than a subculture.” Stores and brands like Supreme and Santa Cruz started with core values ​​that allowed marginalized groups of society to group together, wear, and be part of the same group. Supreme was opened by a group of skaters who say they took influence in their style from punk music and values ​​were a brand that only a small group of people who knew the store would go for, however it's not hard to see that this has changed dramatically and now it's definitely not a brand with punk values ​​or even those of a skate shop, but now it's a company that shows off and flaunts its extremely expensive clothes and miscellaneous items without thinking twice about how they performed and now it seems jump on the bandwagon saying they belong to the punk subculture without maintaining all their values ​​to try to attract disaffected and disassociated young people like me into their company to gain credibility on the.