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Mohawk or torn bangs, baggy pants, flowered sneakers — modern boys and girls often look exotic. What does their appearance say? Katya, Yegor, Sasha and Andrey agreed that our experts would decipher their expressive messages.
Young people are always very attentive to their appearance. Choosing their style, dress code and manners, they want to stand out and be special, while carefully observing the unwritten laws of their circle. Demonstrating their exotic appearance, they symbolically separate themselves from the disturbing world of adults in which they will live. And at the same time they express hope for a new communication — more vivid, provocative, dynamic than the «outdated» relations of the generation of their parents.
“They challenge the ordinary consciousness, which uses clear oppositions: children vs. adults, clean vs. dirty, decent vs. indecent,” says Olga Vainshtein, a culturologist and bestselling author of The Dandy: Fashion, Literature, Lifestyle. “But since we don’t have a clue to their weird, cheeky appearance, it’s disturbing, annoying.”
Hippies, goths, freaks, with all their appearance defiantly ignore the norms and rules of the establishment. Like ancient Greek actors, they hide behind masks that help them survive the next stage of growing up, and with the help of humor they are released from the tension of impulses that disturb them.
To form a personality, everyone needs to remain opaque to their parents for some time.
“The androgynous, sexless nature of their clothing gives boys and girls the opportunity to avoid the daunting questions associated with choosing a sexual identity,” says psychotherapist Patrice Huer. — Wide trousers and tight jeans are two sides of the same coin: I hide or show my body, because its transformations scare me. By choosing a “weird” (from an adult’s point of view) clothing style, yesterday’s teenagers give themselves the opportunity to prolong the soothing period of playful and narcissistic bisexuality.
“But the clothing of a person of a subculture is also a suit that changes much more slowly than fashion,” Olga Vainshtein continues, “if a young person indicates his belonging to a group, he broadcasts in his appearance not only the current ideology of this community, but also his story.
For example, red, green and yellow are the main colors of the Rastafarian subculture, which originated in Jamaica in the 30s of the last century. Modern rastamans, choosing the same combination of colors, demonstrate their belonging to a strong subculture that has preserved its traditions for decades. They oppose themselves to the culture of «white Babylon», focused on material values, and consciously maintain a connection with nature, striving to find harmony and peace.
The appearance of young people helps to better understand themselves and the society in which we live. In order to form a personality, everyone needs to remain opaque to their parents for some time. Adults, on the other hand, sometimes have polar opposite reactions to the appearance of adolescents. The desire to figure out what they want to say with this defiant look hides a sense of helplessness and guilt that their child is not like everyone else. But we should moderate our curiosity in relation to the young, learn to be more observant and restrained.
Rastaman
Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst:
“A positive attitude, “always a good mood” is often just a facade, on guard of which there are large headphones that fence off and protect from the “non-positive” world and their not always positive feelings. Do dreadlocks mean a rejection of mother’s hair, of their connection with the mother, with her femininity-sacrifice?
Dreadlocks, reminiscent of curly snakes, are an excellent defense against sexual-love relationships. In order not to become a victim of men, you need to keep them close to you, make them friends. Gorgon Medusa is a symbol of a seductive, inaccessible and phallic woman. She attracts men, but her serpentine hair repels or destroys those who claim to be intimate with her.
Dreadlocks are both a protest against the feminine and maternal, while maintaining the earliest connection with the mother. They are like a soft plush toy (a transitional object of early childhood from the mother), which is always with you and which, unlike the mother, the father does not take away at night.
Olga Weinstein, culturologist:
“Katya’s appearance speaks of belonging to the Rastafarians: this is not only the traditional color scheme of clothes, but also a protest hairstyle — dreadlocks. According to legend, supporters of the Ethiopian emperor Ras Tafari made a vow not to wash their hair until the emperor returned from exile — and it lasted six years.
Naturally, dreadlocks are taken as a challenge to social conventions because they look dirty. And the very name «dreadlocks» means «terrifying.» In fact, this is a hairstyle that combines elements of order and anarchy at the same time.
Hipster
Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst:
“Matryoshka is not only a symbol of a child in the womb and their inextricable symbiotic relationship with each other that removes from the relationship of the father. It is also a symbol of the earliest infantile fantasy about one’s own omnipotence, about oneself as the center of the universe.
The coat of arms of Russia is also an attribute of omnipotent power, but already paternal. Envy of the power of the mother and the power of the father leads to identification either with the omnipotent father, or with the omnipotent mother hidden from him in a bag, which allows you to maintain a fantasy of your own exclusiveness and avoid growing up associated with the acceptance of many restrictions.
Olga Weinstein, culturologist:
“Modern hipster is usually a consumer of expensive things, keeping a close eye on fashion. Yegor looks non-aggressive and conformist, the element of provocation is weakened in his appearance. He is a victim of the frequent effect of fashion: instead of being original, a person merges with the crowd. Shock has turned into chic… An emphatically androgynous look is included in the general subcultural policy of loosening the basic oppositions: feminine-masculine, cheap-expensive, clean-dirty, etc.”
Rapper
Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst:
“The image of a tough, self-confident guy can hide an unresolved internal conflict with an authoritarian father figure. The son is considered «gouging». The inability to get approval and feel the respect of the father, his power over the mother can give rise to very strong and forbidden aggression inside a person.
The desire to take power away from my father and become the “master of life” myself, blocked in childhood by the fear of punishment from a powerful father, could later be realized in a defensive way: inside myself, I would be both a gouging son and a tough father. In this case, all aggression, initially directed outward, turns inside the person. Unconsciously, he makes himself hurt (tattoo) in order to constantly confirm and doubt that he is a real man.
Olga Weinstein, culturologist:
“Sasha displays his tattoos as a sign of belonging to a strong group, as if he had gone through a sacred ritual of initiation. This is connected with the rites of passage: I show my wounds, which means that I have moved to a new level of development.
His shapeless blood-colored robe can be interpreted both as a priestly attire and as the attire of a patient who has just left the operating room, having acquired stigmata, symbols of inner identity. When we wear clothes a few sizes too big, it’s a sign of combat readiness, so Sasha tells himself and others: I look big and intimidating.
Punk
Andrey Rossokhin, psychoanalyst:
“The aggressiveness and belligerence on display here is more like a mask that protects the subtle and very vulnerable soul of a person who is sure that the world does not love and does not accept either himself or his feelings. Not wanting to kill himself, turning into a good for the mother, but a dead person inside, he turns the situation around. Dead on the outside, alive on the inside.
The key point in clothing is the patch, this is an image in the negative: you need to show a frightening negative to hide the deep need for tender relationships and the pain of their seeming impossibility. The fear of this pain makes it impossible to receive and give tenderness and love, forcing you to release thorns and thus protect yourself. Inside, there may be a feeling of emptiness, emptyness — like a hole in one’s own body (ear).
Maintaining a mohawk requires a lot of time and care. This is the hidden self-care that the adolescent’s living self carries out in such a bizarre form, partly making up for the possible lack of early maternal care.
Olga Weinstein, culturologist:
“The hallmark of punk is dissonance. The elements of the costume are torn out of their usual context and put together: the military shirt is combined with tight stylish trousers, but at the same time in traditional Scottish colors. Different earrings in the ears, deliberate asymmetry, a mohawk on the head, and curls in the back.
The main message of punk is the combination of the incongruous. This is a semiotic guerrilla war, the desire to shock the inhabitants without fail. Quite often, the shock element in the appearance of punk arises due to the paraphernalia of fetishism, which goes back to the aesthetics of sexual sadomasochism.