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In the last three decades, the professional class has splintered into two distinct factions. Those who work in investment banking, private equity, management consulting, and specialized forms of medicine and law often achieve fortunes on par with the lower ranks of New Money.
The other faction is the creative class, a term coined by the sociologist Richard Florida to describe those who find stable middle-class incomes through “creative” occupations such as writer, journalist, magazine editor, graphic designer, photographer, fashion buyer, and interior decorator.
For the rich, culture becomes a realm to communicate symbols of their monetary advantages; members of the professional class, on the other hand, communicate superiority in their manipulation of culture.
But what does signaling look like when individuals lack large amounts of economic, social, educational, or elite cultural capital?
For those who lack capital, signaling tends to adapt the logic of New Money conspicuous consumption to smaller-scale purchases.
Every neighborhood had its own sneaker conventions: Nike was popular in uptown Manhattan, Adidas in Queens, FILA in Brooklyn. But as with any group, living up to the basic convention affords only normal status. Originality and authenticity are required to rise above others.
Due to the inherent elitism in most cultural criticism, “kitsch” is a pejorative term. But we should think about kitsch in a value-neutral way—as a specific type of commercial product that copies the format of high culture (books, music, films, clothing, interior goods) but removes its artistic aspirations.
Among the best-known examples of kitsch are Muzak, schmaltzy songs, paintings of Elvis on velvet, pink lawn flamingos, plastic miniature copies of marble busts, Soviet realist art, and the entirety of Las Vegas.
“Consumers of kitsch,” writes the philosopher of art Tomáš Kulka, “do not buy kitsch because it is kitsch; they buy it because they take it for art.” This often creates an inverse relationship between professional-class taste and mass popularity.
Kitsch may be pleasurable, but its ubiquity means it doesn’t provide any status boost. An advantage in signaling requires standing out. This encourages a flash sensibility—bright and showy aesthetics, usually achieved through the purchase of low-level luxury goods.
Minimalism is always a privilege; in signaling, the poor can’t afford to look generic. The goal instead is maximal ornamentation on even the cheapest objects. Russians today pay thousands to have images of lemurs, reclining polar bears, Minions, and Chuck Norris airbrushed on their cars.
The lower-status aspiration toward luxury goods manifests clearly in the behavior of lottery winners, who do not typically mimic Old Money lifestyles, place money into trusts, or patronize avant-garde artists.
Companies respond by manufacturing specific goods that serve as status symbols for those classes’ positional strategies.
British authorities had feared a rise in juvenile crime and social disorder in the aftermath of World War II, and now youth gangs were indeed roving around the country committing sensational crimes in fancy Edwardian suits.
a reporter from the tabloid the Daily Express heard young women call their well-dressed hooligan boyfriends “teddy boys,” a play on the diminutive form of Edward.
The United Kingdom survived the onslaught of the teddy boys, but the group lives on in our collective memory as a vivid example of a postwar subculture.
Wanton destruction provided teddy boys and girls with more than weekend kicks. Communities such as gangs and cults offer the disrespected a chance to be reborn as beloved and welcomed comrades. Infamy is often preferable to anonymity.
From hobos to pickpocket gangs, subcultures have long existed. The big change came with consumerism, which elevated subcultural life beyond petty crime and cryptic argot and into extreme clothing styles, wild musical genres, strange social rituals, and recreational drug use.
The teds made the most of rising blue-collar wages to peacock each weekend in pseudo-aristocratic suits and immaculate pompadours, while their straitlaced peers trudged through the grind of school and work in drab clothing.
In the United Kingdom, after the teddy boys came cosmopolitan mods on Vespa scooters, a cult that then morphed into laborer-chic skinheads.
Disadvantaged ethnic minorities also form their own alternative status groups—crafting cultural oases of music, fashion, and leisure to escape structural discrimination.
Young Jamaican immigrants to England in the 1960s, known as rude boys, wore flashy mohair suits and porkpie hats. In California, Chicanos created their own culture of low-rider automobiles.
In the 1960s, middle-class youth felt their own spirit of rebellion and abandoned their parents’ staid customs to form alternative status groups known as countercultures.
While the teds were just out for a good time, countercultural Beats espoused extreme spontaneity, sexual freedom, and consciousness expansion as a spiritual antidote to the stifling “gray flannel” conformity of fifties America.
A less extreme middle-class version of the alternative status group is the hobbyist group: pods of individuals building mutual respect networks based on common interests.
And just as in the case of teens joining a subculture, open membership in certain hobbyist groups can result in low global status. But once inside the group, members enjoy the social approval of their peers.
But if subcultures form as a solution to compensate for status disadvantages, why do prosperous middle-class kids create their own alternative status groups?
But even the most privileged teenagers can benefit from extra esteem when they feel marginalized and oppressed, their freedom constricted by curfews, groundings, and financial dependency.
In theory there is no age limit on membership to alternative status groups. And yet the most famous subcultures and countercultures have been youth cultures.
Teens use odd clothing styles, trendy dances, and slang (“groovy,” “doobie,” “cheugy”) to erect clear fences between young and old.
Youth culture enabled teens to flip the script and create criteria that made them superior to their prim parents. And as the newest members of society, they saw their parents’ norms as arbitrary anyway.
working-class subcultures very rarely channel their social defiance into articulated political or spiritual beliefs.
Upper-middle-class hippies on college campuses, by contrast, laid out their antiestablishment attitudes with pseudo-philosophy and bookish rhetoric.
The Ivy League–educated Beat poets cribbed their deviant lifestyles from working-class white hipsters, and Beat books then inspired a middle-class hippie movement on college campuses.
Blessing or even tolerating subcultural transgressions is a dangerous acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of mainstream norms. Thus subcultures and countercultures are often cast as modern folk devils.
For all the pop culture successes of subcultures and countercultures, however, they never overthrew the status system. Alternative status groups are mostly temporary solutions.
As teens in subcultures reach adulthood, the social costs of subculture membership begin to outweigh its benefits. At a certain age “selling out” is the better means to secure higher status.
Subcultures and countercultures need particularly high fences that demonstrate their intentional separation from the standard class hierarchy of straight society. This requires going beyond the realm of acceptable difference.
The easiest method for subcultural distinction is the negation of standard conventions: intentionally doing the opposite of the mainstream.
Youth subcultures are rarely artistic or design collectives, which means their stylistic innovations tend to adapt, warp, and blend preexisting looks and commodities rather than create new looks from scratch.
Most subcultural and countercultural innovation thus begins as bricolage—the mixing and matching of preexisting styles and objects to imbue them with new meanings.
there must be high signaling costs to keep out normies. Subcultural and countercultural styles require significant expenditures of time, money, and reputation.
Over time rebellious styles eventually become conventional within alternative status groups and, at that point, members must adhere to them to receive normal status.
Alternative status groups may represent an escape from the primary social hierarchy, but they’re not an escape from status structures in general.
This fuels the common complaint that joining a subculture is simply trading one uniform for another.
When subcultures are small cults, the most dedicated members receive more status than hangers-on, which incentivizes the core members to indulge in even more extreme practices with higher signaling costs.
If the subcultural looks are too outrageous, members take a large hit in global status. Fewer individuals will want to join, and the remaining members will become more reliant on the subculture for esteem.
Marley eventually took up its credo, and as his music spread around the world in the 1970s, so did the conventions of Rastafarianism—from dreadlocks, now known as “locs,” as a fashionable hairstyle to calling marijuana “ganja.”
Rastafarianism is not an exception: the radical conventions of teddy boys, mods, rude boys, hippies, punks, bikers, and surfers have all been woven into the mainstream.
Subcultures and countercultures manage to achieve a level of influence that belies their raw numbers. Most teens of the 1950s and 1960s never joined a subculture.
