The Genres of Fashion-Music and Clothing Trends

The Genres of Fashion

A think piece by Joslyn Danielson

Identity is huge now. There is a label for nearly every interest you can have. Whovian, Trekkie, Furry, Belieber, the Beyhive, Deadheads, Jonatics, Directioners...This is not a new idea. People have long had this innate need to belong and they create niches and cliques for basically anything you can imagine.

In this article I am going to focus on the relationship between music fandoms and fashion. I will also be drawing a lot from the fantastic book titled Style Tribes: The Fashion Of Subcultures by Caroline Young. In the introduction Young starts right off in the first sentence of her book by making this connection from music to fashion. Young declares that, “Style and fashion have long been a means of self-expression, and, often along with music, used as a way to identify with a particular ideology or subculture.”

Resistance against the norm and political revolutionary ideas have been peppered throughout basically all new style trends in history. They also tend to be based in the new music the young and free-thinking people are listening to. In turn, these music fandoms develop an aesthetic that makes it clear to the world what you like and believe simply by looking at your clothes.

For example let’s go back in history just a little bit to the Flappers of the prohibition era 1920’s. They were free-thinking, party-loving, sex-having ‘harlets’ that danced ‘seductively’ to (almost exclusively) Ragtime; a new music genre for the times that was viewed as ungodly and vulgar because of how it made the body move. Not to mention that this genre had come out of the black community in America, and in the 1920’s civil rights still had a long way to go. Out of this music genre was born the Flapper style of feathered headdresses, bobbed hairstyles, and shorter knee-length skirts. The flappers loathed boredom and adored dance.

Another example of this phenomenon is history is the Hippie movement of the 1960’s which supported free love, drug use, and anti-war pacifism. The movement gained momentum when the draft began and these young peace-makers were forced into the midst of the Vietnam war. The popular music of the time reflects this ideology sometimes subtly, and sometimes not so subtly. The birth of the music festival also took off around this time with the massive phenomenon which was Woodstock.

One more fandom that deserves mention is the Deadheads of the 1970’s, a fandom so intense that people would drop everything, pick up their lives and follow the Grateful Dead on their entire tour around the country. Deadheads were often involved in environmental and social activism, and were often seen as fanatical by the ‘regulars’ of their time. But to them, they believed they had found a community in which they were included, understood, and accepted. The Deadheads even created their own slang terminology and subcultures within their subculture. One example of this is the Wharf Rats who were dedicated to creating a space where people could be comfortable in the culture while remaining sober and not participating in the heavy drug and alcohol use that was prevalent at the concerts and on the tours.

A few more fashion subcultures to note that are based on and even named after their corresponding music genres are Disco, Punk, Hip-hop, Swing Kid, Grunge, Neo-Rockabilly, and Riot Girl which was coined on stage by Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill in the 1990’s. Some more modern examples are the Rave scene and Festi-girls, Country music fashion, and Steampunk, a common style at the Burning Man Festival.

Young people were (and still are) able to identify with a subculture and find a feeling of belonging based off their music taste and fashion choices. Many people feel like they know themselves better if they can label themselves into a certain group, and stick to these labels possibly to a fault. They tend to use their fashion as an advertisement to let others know their set of beliefs and interests simply by looking at them. It is a way to express outwardly who you are inwardly. It is also celebrities and musicians that set the standard for many new/adapted fashion trends such as the ‘neo-grunge’ style of Billie Eilish.

Our generation took this idea of fandoms and identity and ran with it. ‘Identify’ is a word used many times in Young’s book as well as others relating to this topic. When taken too far, It is here that I believe we enter the dangerous realm of Stan Culture (a portmanteau of the words Stalker and Fan). Stan Culture is a new term to describe the unhealthy and obsessive ‘stalker’ fans. This type of mentality is not new to those who achieve fame (especially women), and celebs have been dealing with these people since celebrity became a phenomenon in the world. However, the internet has made this problem exponentially worse. Being a stalker was way more difficult in the days before the internet. With modern technology almost anyone can research and learn anything about a person via the internet and social media including where they will be that day and when. Not only that, but the obsessive fandom has become normalized in these niche online communities and there’s almost nothing that can be done legally unless there is an inherent threat.

Where is the line between healthy and unhealthy fandoms? Between individual expression and mob-mentality? It is all very subjective and unfortunately hard to determine. But in any culture or subculture there are of course the negatives and the positives, and there will always be bad apples. Subcultures around music however have offered so many young people a sense of belonging and identity that differs from their parent’s generation. It allows them to meet and surround themselves with like-minded people, and gives them the opportunity to create the human that they want to be. It allows them to find their tribe.