Cultures, Identities, HistoriesPleasure and PoliticsAnother outcome of the argument between structuralists and culturalists was
a repositioning of focus in cultural studies and history that has had further
ramifications for the study of fashion. Abstract debates about theory and
methodology were superseded in the late 1970s by the opening up of new,
previously hidden areas of study and fresh perspectives on old political
problems. In social history, those receptive to cultural studies concerns
oriented around the formation of the History Workshop Journal, which aimed
to move discussion away from the academy and into the realm of working
people’s lives, stressing the importance of feminist and other hidden voices,
utilizing the power of oral and non-traditional historical sources that lay
outside of the “official record”, and claiming that theory might provide
answers to social and political problems learnt from the past. In cultural
studies, associates of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964, and later directed by Stuart
Hall, drew in methods from sociology and anthropology and saw a similar
shift in emphasis. Histories of everyday life focused especially on subcultures,
examining their construction, their relation to dominant hegemony, and their
histories of resistance and incorporation. Much of this work examined the
rituals and practices that generated meaning and pleasure within, precisely,
that fragment of the cultural field which earlier pioneers from Frankfurt
through to Hoggart had dismissed: urban youth subcultures. Dick Hebdige’s
work on this phenomenon^29 arguably laid the foundation for several studies
of fashion and the young which have fed back in to the dress history
mainstream,^30 culminating in both the Streetstyle Exhibition^31 at the V&A
and the earlier collected essays published under the title Chic Thrills.^32
The whole notion of a “pleasurable” consumption of clothing, which
subcultural studies partly raised, is an idea that has now become familiar in
fashion histories spanning a broad chronology. But its substance formed the
basis of the last political crisis to rock the cultural studies field. The rise of
postmodernism, with its questioning of value and authenticity together with
the economic effects of Thatcherism and the Lawson boom in the mid-1980s,
placed the issue of pleasure and consumption at the centre of the cultural
- Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen, 1979.
- Polhemus, Ted, Streetstyle. From Sidewalk to Catwalk, London: Thames and Hudson,
- de la Haye, Amy and Cathie Dingwall, Surfers, Soulies, Skinheads and Skaters, London:
Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996. - Ash, Juliet and Elizabeth Wilson, Chic Thrills, London: Pandora, 1992.