BA2 CLASS READING - FASHION IN SOCIETY - THE SECOND HAND MARKET GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text.

SECONDHAND DRESSES AND THE ROLE OF THE RAGMARKET. ANGELA MCROBBIE. 1997.

Several attempts have been made recently to understand "retrostyle". These have all taken as their starting point that accelerating tendency in the 1980s to ransack history for key items of dress, in a seemingly eclectic and haphazard manner...

Most of the youth subcultures of the postwar period have relied on secondhand clothes found in jumble sales and rag markets as the raw material for the creation of style. Although a great deal has been written about the meaning of these styles, little has been said about where they have come from. In the early 1980s the magazine iD developed a kind of vox pop of street style which involved stopping young people and asking them to itemize what they were wearing, where they had got it and for how much. Since then many of the weekly and monthly fashion publications have followed suit, with the result that this has now become a familiar feature of the magazine format...

Secondhand style owes its existence to those features of consumerism which are characteristic of contemporary society. It depends, for example, on the creation of a surplus of goods whose use value is not expended when their first owners no longer want them. They are then revived, even in their senility, and enter into another cycle of consumption... Patterns of taste and discrimination shape the desires of secondhand shoppers as much as they do those who prefer the high street or the fashion showroom. And those who work behind the stalls and counters are skilled in choosing their stock with a fine eye for what will sell. Thus although there seems to be an evasion of the mainstream, with its mass-produced goods and marked-up prices, the "subversive consumerism" of the rag market is in practice highly selective in what is offered and what, in turn, is purchased. For every single piece rescued and restored, a thousand are consigned to oblivion... The sources which are raided for "new" secondhand ideas are frequently old films, old art photographs, "great" novels... The apparent democracy of the market, from which nobody is excluded on the grounds of cost, is tempered by the very precise tastes and desires of the secondhand searchers. Secondhand style continually emphasizes its distance from secondhand clothing...

In the last few years many major department stores have redesigned the way in which their stock is displayed in order to create the feel of a market place. In the Top Shop basement in Oxford Street, for example, there is a year-round sale. the clothes are set out in chaotic abundance. The rails are crushed up against each other and packed with stock, which causes the customers to push and shove their way through. This intentionally hectic atmosphere is heightened the disc jockey who cajoles the shoppers between records to buy at an even more frenzied pace...

The vitality of street markets today owes much to the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s...

Hippie preferences for old fur coats, crepe dresses and army greatcoats, shocked the older generation... But they were not acquired merely for their shock value. Those items favoured by the hippies reflected an interest in pure, natural and authentic fabrics and a repudiation of the man-made synthetic materials found in high-street fashion. The pieces of clothing sought out by hippie girls tended to be antique lace petticoats, pure silk blouses, crepe dresses, velvet skirts and pure wool 1940s-styled coats. In each case these conjured up a time when the old craft values still prevailed and when one person saw through his or her production from start to finish...

While hippie style had run out of steam by the mid-1970s, the alternative society merely jolted itself and rose to the challenge of punk. (McRobbie in Welters and Lillethun, 2011, pp.450-462).

REFERENCE

McRobbie, A. in Welters, L. and Lillethun, A. (eds) (2011) The fashion reader. 2nd edn. Oxford: Berg.