In 1979, Dick Hebdige addressed the profundity of the rock & roll style by examining the function of subculture, specifically, 1970s British teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, and punks. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige argues that style is a form of “intentional communication’ used by subcultures to make sense of their members, and to mark themselves as such to the dominant culture. He argues that, contrary to the (still) popular assumption that subcultures embrace total lawlessness and chaos, the internal structures of these groups are, in fact, “characterized by an extreme orderliness: each part is organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense out of the world.” The recognition of something as a style necessarily requires some common, identifiable quality. Independent elements are adapted to a dominant trait so that every individual appears marked by an expression of the whole. In Hebdige’s analysis, for example, style is a search for the correspondences in the clothing of the punks, which he explains as an organizing principle simultaneously determining the character of the components and the design of the whole.

‘Style’ then, is composed of all the symbolic and literal aspects – dress, appearance, language, ritual occasions, interactions, music – that members of a culture or subculture produce and consume within the boundaries of the group. For Hebdige, it is quite specifically style that “causes a formation of unity within a group’s relations, situations, experience”. In fact, style functions in a complex relationship to culture. Hebdige’s notion quite clearly draws its methods from the semiological concept of the symbolic structure of meaning.

The clothing worn by an average man or woman on the street is chosen according to taste, preference, financial constraints, etc., and these choices are significant in positioning the wearer within a corresponding set of social roles. These selections encompass an assortment of messages and meanings, which are transmitted through a number of complex social determinants such as class and status, self-image, and attractiveness, etc. Hebdige argues that clothing choices can be just as expressive of ‘normality’ and ‘naturalness’ as they can be of ‘deviance’. Nonetheless, the styles of subcultures are distinguished from the styles of their surrounding culture precisely because they appear so fabricated. It is the appearance of difference that reveals what Louis Althusser has called the “false obviousness of everyday practice”.