Friday, February 03, 2006

A Design For Life

I've never really had a "look", a cohesive style, but I would like one. This passage on mods from Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning Of Style, neatly sums up my thoughts:
Unlike the Defiantly obtrusive teddy boys, the mods were more subtle and subdued in appearance: they wore apparently conservative suits in subdued colours, they were fastidiously neat and tidy...The mods invented a style which enabled them to negotiate smoothly between school, work, and leisure, and which concealed as much as it stated. Quietly disrupting the orderly sequence which leads from signifier to signified, the mods undermined the conventional meaning of 'collar, suit and tie', pushing neatness to the point of absurdity. They made themselves like Ronald Blythe's discontented labourers into 'masterpieces': they were a little too smart, somewhat too alert, thanks to amphetamines.

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