Hebridge- "Subculture: The Meaning of Style"

Bricolage- Construction or creation from a diverse range of available things

Throughout the whole essay by Hebridge, the most interesting section was “Style as bricolage”, meaning that subcultures are the parent culture expressed in unconventional ways. A subculture takes the same available things that the whole of a society is made up of and creates its own. It uses symbols, language and codes and gives them its own meanings.

Subcultures are basically movements within a culture that take the dominant focuses of a society and spin them. Usually, these subcultures react to the dominant culture by either distancing themselves from it or taking it too far. Punks, for example, took the parent culture of Britain and acted in exact opposite ways. Instead of throwing away safety pins they wore them, and instead of seeing a white-collar lifestyle as successful, they saw it as empty and worthless. They saw desire as undesired and ugly as beautiful. So, in doing this, they created their own order in anarchy and created a family/ society of people who all could identify with the same ideas.

The Nightmare before Christmas is a good example of subculture formation and the reason why people remain in subcultures. The citizens of Halloweentown saw things like coffins and skeltons as wonderful and beautiful, but the citizens of Christmas town saw things like colors and Christmas trees as beautiful, just like Halloween-towners thought of being frightened as happiness. Both towns created different meanings from a range of diverse things. For example, when the citizens of Halloween town made gifts they made scary things and in their town they thought they were great and enjoyed giving and receiving them. But when they sent them to Christmas town, the people of Christmastown thought they were being attacked because they were used to getting cute stuff like dolls and trains, not skulls and snakes that ate their Christmas trees. Just like if the people of Christmastown sent happy gifts to Halloweentown, they would have absolutely no used for them because their idea of a “gift” is completely different.

The two places can represent a dominant culture, Christmastown, and a subculture, Halloweentown. Halloweentown took Christmas and created it in a different way, but both towns went about constucting it with the same ingredients. This could be compared to how a dominant culture functions in virtually the same way as a subculture. A subculture finds its coherence in a different form than its parent culture, but both find coherence in something.