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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
there are a large number of industries in Hackney employing only women; there are a
few in which men only are employed . . . the net result of this condition of affairs is that
unmarried women are constantly attracted to Hackney and unmarried men are constantly
compelled to leave it. This accounts for the magnificent display of finery in Mare Street
on Sunday evenings, and for the fact that the Jills promenade together. Most of the Jacks
are considerably their juniors – mere lads who have not yet come to the age when they
must flit in search of work and the making of a home of their own. 36
Attempting to read subcultural activity from the evidence of a monkey parade
dominated by young women presents interpretative problems which are ultimately
highly revealing, the field of writing on fashion and working-class youth culture
having been largely dominated by discussion of the practices of young men, often
directly contrasting with treatments of middle-class and aristocratic fashionable
practices. 37 Indeed in the more recent texts on masculinity and consumption
postwar male subcultures are usually credited with opening the gates to a wider
masculine engagement with fashionable consumption in the final decades of the
twentieth century. 38 Conversely in broader debates on the nature of modernity and
mass culture, critics and historians have tended to link issues surrounding
consumerism and femininity without recourse to considerations of class or
masculinity, so the acknowledgment of a public engagement with various levels
of fashionability by working-class girls is perhaps less surprising in this context. 39
Sally Alexander and Angela McRobbie have both provided more nuanced evidence
of young working-class women’s ability to read and reinterpret the messages
of middle-class clothing retailers and advertisers, questioning the assumptions of
explanations of consumption and gender that prioritize coercion, though much of
this work has not been reflected in mainstream narratives of teenage style or the
evolution of popular fashion. 40
In fact, it is precisely the supposedly unprecedented emergence of young
proletarian men as avid followers and decoders of fashion in the 1960s that
historians of subcultures have isolated as an illustration of the uniqueness and
revolutionary quality of the postwar experience. 41 However, by prioritizing new
male consumers and male-oriented boutiques and subcultural groupings in the later
period and accepting an overarching discourse of feminized consumption for
earlier periods, such histories have missed a great deal. In the figure of ’Arry or
the Mare Street girl promenader it is possible to discern the precursor of the former
and an amendment to the latter propositions, which rather dilutes their significance.
The unpacking of historical subcultural style thus presents a paradigm case of the
manner in which constructions of gender and class, like notions of fashionability
and modernity, are contingent on more immediate contexts and concerns. 42 The
aggressive model of the sharply attired cockney needs to be read as part of the
commercial, sexual, and social flux suggested by the forging of identities in Mare
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