By Yasmin Ali
For some reason I’ve been thinking about Dick Hebdige. Not the Professor of Art at the University of California, nor the ‘Dick Hebdige’ of Chris Kraus’s cult novel, ‘I Love Dick’, but the young cultural theorist who emerged from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies armed with the idea that how we dressed, and the music we listen to, at least when young, carried a significance that made it a fit subject for scholarly study.
Obviously all those Dicks are one and the same person, now a 71 year old in Santa Barbara, rather than a lecturer at Wolverhampton Polytechnic (a curious omission from his CV on Wikipedia). But the subject of his first book, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, the style signifiers of youthful resistance in postwar British ‘pop’ music and fashion, has come back to haunt my idle imagination. In lockdown, the kitchen window overlooking a sometimes busy street, offers an opportunity to review the style tribes of the mid-20th Century on as they hit, well, the age group of the punk professor.
It’s been true for some time that there are people, particularly men, who hang on to the styles of their youth with a tenacity that is almost admirable. I recall, perhaps three years ago, being on a Number 50 bus passing from Balsall Heath towards Moseley. It stopped outside a sheltered housing development, and an elderly man with a walking stick waited for the driver to lower the step of the bus. With audible effort he clambered aboard, splendid in his Doc Martens, jeans, Ramones tee shirt, and leather biker jacket. When shopping on the High Street I regularly saw a woman, well into her sixties I would guess, who had never stopped being a Bananarama clone, in clumpy boots, ra-ra skirt, and oversized, off the shoulder sweatshirt, scarf tied in a flamboyant bow in her curly hair.
My guess is that in lockdown people are clearing out attics, rediscovering the clothes they could never quite bear to throw away. Band tee shirts, favourite jeans, rude boy hats, and bondage trousers, are being reclaimed, and, where they will fit, reworn. I’ve spotted innumerable older men in distressed tan leather jackets with huge shoulder pads, and Farah slacks, strutting their stuff on the way to the Co-Op, no doubt whistling a little Duran Duran to themselves. They nod to the man with the natty grey dreads escaping from his stately tam. And why not, as Barry Norman used to say in those far-off days?
All of which necessarily begs the question: what does it all mean? After all, if it was once about ‘resistance’, a rejection of social norms, a challenge to the prevailing political order, what is it now? Ghosts walking again in plague times? Or something else, something more contemporary?
The answer, I think, lies not in an ever-latent nostalgia for lost youth, but in a general unleashing of bonds. For all the discipline required to enforce even Britain’s relaxed approach to Covid lockdown, there is currently a distinct air of anarchy in the UK.
The subversive style signifiers of today are not the domain of the young. Ubiquitous ‘athleisure’ garb. stick-on eyebrows, foxy beehive hijabs, trainers as lurid as ‘Bake Off’ cakes, these selfie-ready, Instagram-friendly, ‘looks’ feel to this oldie more like submission than subversion. The ‘indie’ looks of the young middle class with pretensions are retreads; Seventies Laura Ashley in Thirties intellectual spectacles.
The old soul rebels are rocking the ‘Tieless with Aga’ look on the Zoom conference calls now bent on overthrowing the ancien regime. Fleece-Punk is capturing the zeitgeist.
This isn’t mere flippant observation. Take the ‘look’ of politics, of the news media, the visual markers of power and authority with which we have all grown up. For over a century, the suit and tie, and the female equivalents, often a version of a suit, have been a uniform denoting high status. There have been flirtations with informality - Blair triumphant in jeans and open-neck shirt, Cameron’s ‘dress-down awaydays’ for his Shadow Cabinet - but these were always exceptions to prove the rule.
No longer. The lockdown could be the death of deferential suitdom. News anchors still wear their uniforms, even when broadcasting from their own homes, but the Science editor is now - socially distanced in the studio - interviewed in jeans; the political correspondent fronts a story dressed in a parka. The old norms are fraying at the edges.
The government is clinging to the old formality, of course. I watched Grant Shapps being interviewed by Sophy Ridge on Sunday morning. Shapps stood on a London street in suit and tie, Ridge sat in the studio in cocktail dress and heels. It just looked weird, a snapshot from another age.
Yesterday I tuned in to former Chief Scientific Officer Professor David King’s alternative SAGE committee Zoom conference, which was livestreamed on YouTube. I didn’t notice much formality. Who wants to sit in the spare bedroom, or the conservatory in front of an iPad dressed as if for a court appearance? More to the point, what need had this gathering of the knowledgeable and the expert for the external trappings of status, when it is evidence, analysis, and action, that counts, not deference or ritual?
The 2007-8 global financial crisis brought us tented encampments in the financial districts, and demands for things to change, but culturally things didn’t feel changed, so nor did they in political terms. Most people were not impacted in ways that were immediate.
Covid lockdown has, as many have noted, accelerated trends that were already likely, such as more homeworking, less long distance travel, even talk of Universal Basic Income, or a need for less fragile supply chains. But for many people, especially older people, some of these changes need never have been felt at the level of lived experience. Until now. People who felt no need to use a computer beyond its most basic functions are now Zooming, Facetiming, WhatsApping. To see family and friends at all, it has been necessary for former technophobes to embrace the smartphone and the tablet.
But when the ‘expert’ on the news, or the MP interviewed from the family home, looks much like your mother, your son, or granddaughter, or neighbour, a slightly unreliable image on a screen from a recognisably normal domestic interior, something, surely, changes in how we consume those images? The woman in the cardigan talks of virology; the man in the fleece considers the prospect of developing a new vaccine. The mystery, the power conferred by formal dress, a studio setting, professional sound and lighting, are missing, in a sudden act of levelling.
Moreover, stripped of the metaphorical gilt curlicues of the professional televisual frame, we all have to work harder, whichever side of the screen we are on. If the clothes and the setting don’t awe us, we have to listen to what people are saying, and try to decide whether to trust them on the content of their words, not the symbols of their appearance.
The government has tried to hold all this at bay. The daily press conferences are primarily performances of power, rather than useful ways to convey public health information. Aping the American style of political theatre, with a stately setting, the power lecterns, the flags, these often tedious events feel increasingly out of step with the new - and democratised - seriousness.
We will not return to the time before this pandemic. What comes next is essentially in our own hands. But as Stuart Hall, who surely taught Dick Hebdige, once said, ‘a state of emergency is a state of emergence’, If we look at what is emerging in front of our eyes right now, its a kind of subcultural insolence by the knowledge community.
It’s all very punk. Once upon a time, if you knew three chords and wanted to form a band, you could. It was a world of provincial record labels, hand-duplicated fanzines, bin-bag dresses pinned together with safety pins. Today’s equivalent is perhaps more high minded, but the impulse is the same. If the government’s SAGE group is packed with professional committee-sitters with OBEs, rather than working scientists and medics, let’s set up our own committee, and stream the meeting to anyone who wants to watch.
The revolution will be Zoomed.