Untitled - Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative

public. For -mythologists-like Hebdige and Banhes the machine which spins out the
insidious myth consciousness they seek to expose \\ill forever remain a black box: as
such. they are doomed to stand by and watch as its signs and S)mbols drift by. powerless
to effect any kind ofchange.
Angela McRobbie - Zool Suits andSecond-Hand Dresse.f (/988) and
In Ihe (u/lUre Soden' (/999)
Perhaps the hopelessness ofthe positions staked out by the Birmingham School in
the seventies ultimately pro\'ed too much to bear. for almost a decade after Hebdige
authored Subculrure. fellow Birmingham alumnus Angela McRobbie presented l22!
Suits and Second Hand Dresses an Anthology of Fashion and Music. A comparative
reading ofthese two texts illustrates the decisive impact that the decline ofCommunism
had on the sociological imagination. McRobbie's introduction to this volume of
-academic journalism" opens \\ith the obsen.ation that won the Binningham School a
preeminent position in the field ofcultural studies: consumption is an active. dynamic
process that makes possible the creation ofnew. unintended meanings. and enables youth
to interpret and give expressive form to their social and material experience. But
McRobbie gives this potenl and inno\'ative idea a why-worry gloss that strips it ofthe
critical force il possessed in previous works by Willis and Hebdige and situates it
squarely \\ithin the ideological terrain ofconswner capitalism: "What we buy and
consequently wear or display in some public fashion. in tum creates new images. new
and sometimes unintended. constellations ofmeaning. In a sense we become media
farms ourselves. the physical body is (rans/armed infO a campa.1 portable ·,..alleman·"
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