Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style, first published in 1979, is a work of cultural theory that examines the spectacular youth subcultures of post-war Britain, from teddy boys and mods to skinheads and punks, arguing that their styles represent coded forms of resistance to the dominant social order. Drawing on semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), Marxist theory, and structural anthropology (the analysis of underlying cultural structures and symbolic systems), Hebdige treats subcultural style not as mere fashion or deviance but as a meaningful system of communication through which subordinate groups express opposition to the values that define their subordination.

Hebdige opens with a scene from Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal in which a tube of vaseline, confiscated by Spanish police, becomes a symbol of Genet's defiant homosexual identity. This episode establishes the book's central premise: that mundane objects can carry subversive symbolic meaning. Hebdige positions Genet, a French writer and convicted thief, as a model for the subcultural practice of elevating transgression into art. The safety pins, pointed shoes, and motorcycles adopted by youth subcultures take on a similar "double meaning," signaling difference to insiders while provoking suspicion from mainstream society. The book's stated purpose is to decipher the process by which objects are "made to mean and mean again" as style.

Hebdige lays out his theoretical framework by tracing two competing definitions of "culture" identified by the literary scholar Raymond Williams: one conservative, treating culture as a standard of aesthetic excellence, and one anthropological, treating culture as a "whole way of life." He introduces the French critic Roland Barthes's semiotic method, which exposes how apparently natural forms of bourgeois life are systematically "naturalized" and converted into myth so that dominant interests appear universal. Drawing on the French philosopher Louis Althusser, Hebdige defines ideology as something that saturates everyday life as common sense, operating through institutions like the family, schools, and media without people's awareness.

The key political concept is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony: the idea that dominant groups maintain authority not through force alone but by "winning and shaping consent" so that their power appears legitimate and natural. Since hegemony is a "moving equilibrium," never permanently secured, subordinate groups can symbolically repossess commodities and endow them with oppositional meanings. Hebdige argues that youth subcultures signal a breakdown of post-war consensus, with challenges to dominant power expressed obliquely, at the level of signs.

Hebdige situates punk's emergence in the British summer of 1976, when a record heatwave was reframed as a symbol of national decline and the Notting Hill Carnival, a Caribbean festival in London, erupted into violent confrontations. Punk combined elements from the glam rock musician David Bowie, American proto-punk performers and bands (the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell), London pub rock, Northern soul, and reggae. Its eclectic clothing reproduced "the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth cultures in 'cut up' form": quiffs alongside skinhead trousers, leather jackets beside bovver boots (heavy work-style boots associated with skinhead fashion), all held together by safety pins and bondage straps.

Punk embodied an "endemic contradiction" between two antagonistic visions. One derived from the nihilist aesthetic of Bowie, the American writer William Burroughs, and the New York underground. The other came from reggae's vision of a Day of Judgement, promising the overthrow of "Babylon," the Rastafarian term for corrupt Western society. Hebdige argues that understanding punk requires tracing reggae to its West Indian roots. He explains how the Bible played a contradictory role in the Caribbean: Colonial powers used it to justify slavery, but its metaphors of the Israelites' suffering proved amenable to exclusively black interpretations. The Rastafarian movement integrated African cultural memory with these biblical narratives, believing that Haile Selassie's accession to the Ethiopian throne in 1930 fulfilled prophecies of deliverance. In Britain, Rastafarianism became a "style" of resistance expressed through dreadlocks and khaki camouflage, while the sound system, a mobile discotheque of speakers and amplifiers, became a crucial communal institution.

Hebdige traces the dialectical relationship between black and white youth cultures across successive subcultures. The teddy boys of the 1950s appropriated rock 'n' roll but remained hostile toward West Indian immigrants. The mods of the early 1960s were the first subculture to grow up around the West Indians, dancing to soul imports and Jamaican ska in cellar clubs. The skinheads of the late 1960s drew paradoxically on both white working-class and West Indian rude boy cultures (a Jamaican youth style linked to ska and reggae), using the black presence to re-establish continuity with an imagined traditional community while scapegoating other groups to conceal internal contradictions. As reggae became more racially separatist, glam rock filled the vacuum by pursuing "an exclusively white line away from soul and reggae." Punk then emerged in the gap between glam rock's art-school pretensions and working-class frustration.

Drawing on the sociologist Phil Cohen's work on East End London, Hebdige explains that subculture functions as a "compromise solution between two contradictory needs": autonomy from parents and maintenance of parental identifications. Cohen proposed that subculture's "latent function" was to "express and resolve, albeit magically, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture." Hebdige qualifies this by noting that punk did not retrieve cohesive elements from the parent culture but instead parodied alienation and emptiness. He also stresses that the "raw material" of subcultural style is shaped by the media: Punk was not merely responding to unemployment but "dramatizing" what the press had already labeled "Britain's decline."

Hebdige examines two mechanisms through which subcultures are reabsorbed into the dominant order. The commodity form converts subcultural signs into mass-produced objects: By 1977, punk clothing was available by mail order, and the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes produced a couture collection of jewelled safety pins. The ideological form involves domesticating deviance: The press simultaneously denounced punk and ran articles featuring punks with smiling mothers, insisting that the Sex Pistols' frontman Johnny Rotten "is as big a household name as Hughie Green," a popular television presenter.

Applying the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, a process by which elements are combined in improvised ways to generate new meanings, Hebdige explains how subcultural styles are constructed through relocating objects in new contexts. Punk exemplified this dramatically: lavatory chains draped over bin-liners, safety pins worn through cheeks, cheap fabrics turned into garments offering "self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste," and the iconography of sexual fetishism (bondage wear, rubber) placed on the street where it retained its forbidden connotations.

Using the concept of homology, the symbolic fit between a group's values and cultural forms, Hebdige explains how punk's apparent chaos cohered. The trashy clothes, spiky hair, pogo dancing, fanzines, and frantically driven music constituted "the sartorial equivalent of swear words." Yet punk posed a problem for analysis because its signifiers were chosen only to be discarded. The swastika, for instance, was worn not to express fascism (punks were generally anti-fascist) but as "an empty effect" whose value derived from its power to shock. Drawing on the literary theorist Julia Kristeva's concept of "signifying practice," the active process by which meaning is constructed and disrupted through signs, Hebdige argues that punk cohered "elliptically through a chain of conspicuous absences." While skinheads fetishized their class position to return to an imagined past, punks positioned themselves as aliens, playing up their Otherness through make-up, masks, and aliases. Punk's working-classness, though continually referenced, remained abstract, refusing to be traced back to its origins.

Hebdige concludes by returning to his three presiding figures: the Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot, who supplied the definition of culture as a whole way of life; Barthes, who offered a method for reading signs but recognized the analyst's alienation from the culture analyzed; and Genet, who most closely resembles the subcultural outsider. Hebdige acknowledges that members of the subcultures he describes would be unlikely to recognize themselves in his analysis and closes with Barthes's observation: "we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness."