Subcultural style often fits well within the creative-class sensibility. With a premium placed on authenticity, creative-class taste celebrates defiant groups like hipsters, surfers, bikers, and punks as sincere rejections of the straight society’s “plastic fantastic” kitsch. The working classes have a “natural” essence untarnished by the demands of bourgeois society. “What makes Hip a special language,” writes Norman Mailer, “is that it cannot really be taught.”
