You know an e-girl by her Twitch presence or the poses she makes on her Instagram, not by what she wears to school. To be an e-girl is to exist on a screen, mediated. Well, you will, but she’ll just look like a normal young person who shops at Urban Outfitters and is experimenting with her hair right now, just like young people have been doing for eternity. Which is why you’ll almost never see an e-girl in real life. (That is, if you can make the argument that subcultures can still exist today without being immediately swallowed by the mainstream.) It was a lot easier to draw connections between a group’s clothing, the music they listened to, and their socioeconomic status when that group did not exist exclusively in the digital ether, casting doubt on whether it actually exists at all. They didn’t know about Instagram or the internet, where so many subcultures are born now. The problem is that neither Marx nor Hebdige at the time had ever heard of TikTok. That postmodernist, Marxist framework remains the dominant method of dissecting subcultural aesthetics today.
#VOX YOUTUBE GIRL MODS#
He posited that their funny haircuts and jarring clothing was in fact a form of political rebellion related to their status as young, white, and working class: The mods in their polished suiting, he argued, “undermined the conventional meaning of ‘collar, suit and tie’, pushing neatness to the point of absurdity ” punks responded to the neglect felt from society by “rendering working classness metaphorically in chains and hollow cheeks.”īasically, Hebdige proposed that style is inherently political, and that its ties to music make it that much more so. In one of the 20th century’s most influential books on fashion, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the sociologist Dick Hebdige studied the punks, mods, and Teddy boys who hung around London in the 1960s and ’70s.