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...in Britain than anywhere else in 1970s. It is in this context that Dick Hebdige wrote Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. This book, associated with Cultural Studies, builds on earlier work carried out by the Birmingham School on youth subculture and has been widely read. The term “subculture” had been in use for decades before Hebdige propelled it into the limelight. His work mainly focused on marginal groups. Yesterday the punks, today hip hop and tecktonik: so many examples of urban culture, sometimes wild and often anti-authority with their artistic forms of expression, their dress codes and their history. Rather than ignoring them or worse stigmatizing them, it is necessary to try to understand them. This short and concise text is really a pioneering plan: a way to read personal fashion. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige reads style as a form of subversion through four defining concepts: intentional communication, bricolage, homology and signifying practice. For purpose of clarify, this assignment will give an overview of Hebdige’s work in Subculture looking at different examples of former and new subcultures through some of his concepts.
In order to understand the work of Hebdige in Subculture it is important to know the reason for such a project. Hebdige’s work was a solution to comprehending and describing the multiple subcultures in Britain in the 1970s. In postwar Britain several researches were carried out into ethnic groups and the question of race in Cultural Studies but also others which were based on youth subcultures. The first definition of the concept of subculture is 'To refer to a subdivision of a national culture, composed of a combination of a factorable social situations such as class status, ethnics background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a...
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