Christel Stormhøj: Style as a marker of social identity
– a multi-perspective approach to young people’s style.
This article analyses the relations between social identities and style among youth in contemporary Danish society. It deals with the social sources and functions of style. It is based on a study of young men and women from two social classes: working class youths and youth from academic families (middle and upper-middle class).
While social class and gender are basic positional factors in the taste patterns of the young people to a certain extent, there are other significant factors. Among the important generative forces are individual choice, age, and identification with school culture and with different kinds of sub- and micro-cultures. Young people employ style in different ways: as a status marker, as a instrument of resistance, as a way of expressing autonomy, in positioning themselves in relation to others and in developing social groups. Because of this plurality of sources to style and taste, it is necessary to employ a “multi-perspective“ in this kind of research.
