More Hebdige

About the mods again:

“More subtly, the conventional insignia of the business world – the suit, collar and tie, short hair, etc. – were stripped of their original connotations – efficiency, ambition, compliance with authority – and transformed into ‘empty’ fetishes, objects to be desired, fondled and valued in their own right.”

At first I assumed that the new sartorial male might be trying to refill those empty signifiers with their original meaning–”my grandfather was working class and had a pocket square, I will also have a pocket square.” This seems to make sense in one way–without job stability, youth culture creates a suit that reinvigorates clothes and identity with old conservative ideals. Except so much of that side of the design (and butcher, and clothing) world is filled with the rhetoric of importance of those objects and clothes existing for their own sake. There’s no reason to have this pocket square, except that it’s beautiful. The fashion seems to suggest the conservative dandy–and where the dandy used to hope for a return of romantic antiquity, the shepherd, or the poet, or the king, the conservative dandy hopes for a return of the working class as a means, not to freedom through subcultural and group identity, but to bondage through the possibility of working as one individual among many, other, beautiful objects.

Hebdige

Reading Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style today for the new poem/libretto thing I’m working on. Trying to do a king of the mods homage so back into youth culture I dive. Thinking through OOO and Wagner over the last month or so has made the switch back to cultural theory a bit difficult, or torqued maybe. The outside style getting in the way of the things.

But, I’m primarily interested in the mods as a way to view the new sartorial male. It seems to me like the cocktail/butchering/bowtie amassing of knowledge must have something in common with the mods. Hebdige: “[mods push] neatness to the point of absurdity.” Hebdige also argues that “the mods invented a style which enabled them to negotiate smoothly between school, work, and leisure and which concealed as much as it stated.” It’s clear that the sartorial dude must be able to move quickly between events, dates, school, and work, but I’m confused about what they might be conceal. Hebdige argues that the old mods concealed their love of black culture in their style, as well as the remnants of partying, beach fights, record collecting–i.e. the mod style was a way of pushing the weekend back at the work week–but in a moment when the weekend overlaps with the week anyways (at my coffee shop, where people are able to both work and relax with the nintendo that’s plugged in), I’m confused about how or what the sartorial male’s absurd neatness effectively is able to demonstrate or hide.