The Making of a
Subcultural Classic

We’ve all seen it happen and we can all name once quotidian clothing that is now forever associated with a certain cultural movement. The real question, though, is the how and why of this process. Why are some items subcultural staples, defined by their role with punks or mods, goths or hippies, while other items are completely ignored?

The academic study of subcultures (which is itself a disputed term) can be traced back to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, an influential faculty at the University of Birmingham that opened in the 1960s. For most of the 1970s, the centre was led by Stuart Hall and devoted a lot of time and research to post-war British subcultures, with researchers including Dick Hebdige, John Clarke and Hall himself looking at the rise of these groups. One particular area of focus was the role of style in these new subcultural formations.

Writing in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain in the mid ‘70s, Clarke discussed the ways in which the meanings associated with clothing undergo a “transformation and rearrangement” until the item carries a new meaning, specific to its new subcultural setting. This process, in which biker jackets are reappropriated by punks or scooters by mods, leads to the creation of a distinctive style. As Clarke writes, this style has a multifunctional role. On one hand it is the embodiment of that subculture’s identity and the way it sees itself, while on the other it defines the boundaries of the group; who is in and who is out, who is with us and who is against us.

A couple of years later, in his own influential book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige wrote about the ways that “humble objects” are “stolen” by subcultural groups and given new meanings, “which express a form of resistance” to the dominant order. By adopting an item of clothing and subverting its meaning, subcultural groups and their members were therefore challenging the way that the wider world was set up, offering a counterpoint to the rigid systems they saw themselves outside of.

Professor Andrew Groves – professor of Fashion Design at the University of Westminster and the director of the Westminster Menswear Archive – has researched this process, which is often described as bricolage, in the past. “It is fundamental to the formation of subcultures,” he explains. “It is the ability to take items of clothing that have a specific meaning and recontextualize them by placing them on the body in contrast to other garments that have conflicting or opposing meanings, resulting in new meanings and therefore new subcultural styles. In the UK, class has played an important role because dressing ‘above your station’ is a very easy way to upset social hierarchies. Casuals did it by adopting middle leisure clothing, and mods did it in the 1960s by adopting the Fred Perry polo shirt.”

As Professor Groves hints, the Fred Perry polo is an important part of this subcultural bricolage. There are a couple of reasons why this particular item was ripe to be repurposed. “Fred Perry was a working-class tennis player from Stockport, whose success in the 1930s, winning Wimbledon three years in a row, stood in stark contrast to the elitist tennis establishment of the time,” he says. “The emergence of the mods in the early 1960s, which was a predominantly working-class British subculture based on precise ‘formal informal’ dress styles, adopted the Fred Perry shirt, wearing them under their mohair suits, subverting the traditional dress codes of British menswear while also honouring one of their own.”

Throughout post-war British history, the period when subcultures really came to life, they have been constantly subverting the dominant culture through the clothes and styles they pick up. Kevin Quinn, co-founder of the University of the Arts London’s Subcultures Interest Group, points to “numerous instances of ‘normative’ styles being co-opted and decontextualised or recontextualised such as punk’s torn clothing and adornment of everyday objects as attire and post-punk’s austere suit-wearing to advertise specific codes and meanings.”

Looking at the process in which clothes and objects are picked up and worn, customised and reinvented, has a wider importance. “I think it can allow us to observe patterns and trends within society, to see how power structures and hierarchical systems can operate from within and without,” Quinn continues. “Issues of gatekeeping and access are key aspects of subcultures on both conscious and unconscious levels and researching subcultures can act as a lens or prism for wider studies on socio-cultural histories and political developments. It can also highlight the themes of youth, adolescence and adulthood, charting transitions from one to another.”

The bricolage approach to subcultural dressing, in which a diverse range of clothing is used to create a distinctive style, has turned everyday objects into subcultural champions. The Fred Perry Shirt is the perfect example, a tennis polo that has been worn by mods and rockers, punks and rappers, across the world. All those subcultures saw something in the shirt, new meanings they could fill it with and a way to critique, subvert and even mock the dominant culture. All that in one pique shirt.