Chapter 1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Dressed in Street Fashions?: Investigating Virtually Constructed Fashion Subcultures

Abstract

Abstract In May 2016, Aleks Eror’s op-ed article ‘Dear fashion industry: Stop making up bogus subcultures’ on the HighSnobiety website accuses the fashion industry of creating ‘quasi-subcultures’, such as Normcore, Seapunk and Health Goth to promote specific fashion trends via the Internet. Eror argues that these fashion subcultures do not exist in resistance to mainstream culture (as he understands subcultures), but instead offer the specific fashions and their designers cache for being associated with a counterculture and connecting with alternative trends. Setting aside Eror’s narrow understanding of subcultures, he raises questions of authenticity and the current state of virtual fashion subcultures. Still, there is evidence of these subcultures online and growing in substantial numbers regardless of their inception. Furthermore, persons identifying themselves with these groups practice alternativity, which delineates their scenes, artefacts, and practices from those of mainstream Western society. I pursue questions of authenticity regarding these recent fashion subcultures who appear to emerge in close proximity to the launch of specific fashions. The author explores the ways in which these fashion subcultural experiences differ from known subcultures. The author investigates notions of constructed resistance and perceived alternativity and marginalization, as well as how that positionality manifests into a fashion subculture identity.