Visual identity badges lose meaning when their wearers cannot control who adopts them
Evidence
When it first emerged, during the early 1960s, the costume was probably a very good indicator. It was adopted then as an identity badge by young people, largely of middle class origin, who were rejecting the world of their parents and were turning inward in their search for peace (hippies) or turning outward in their search for change (radicals). These young people, however, unlike the elites of old, had no access to laws or the machinery of their enforcement to keep their identity badge undefiled. They could not prevent its adoption by apolitical and aphilosophical working class youth; they could not prevent its co-optation by the “hipper” elements of the American mainstream; and they could not prevent its mass production by manufacturers anxious to get in on the “latest thing.” … The general result was chaos. Department stores did a marvelous business in men’s wigs, catering to the desires of swinging, bearded, but short-haired conservative males to be even more swinging after working hours. Wedding pictures of the aristocratic young appearing on the “society” pages of major metropolitan newspapers were magnificent studies in incongruity. Standing amidst the symbols of wealth, power, and tradition were the bride and groom-she in her granny glasses and “Salvation Army store” dress; he in his beard, beads, and jeans. The picture was further complicated by the fact that the viewer could not be sure whether these wedding outfits were purchased in a second-hand store or at some very chic and expensive boutique. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 454
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s cross-reading on urban categorical strangers: dress previously was a reliable coding mechanism for Lofland’s earlier strangers-in-space argument, and here she shows the mechanism degrading, paralleling Simmel’s blasé erosion of legible individuality.
- ADDENDUM: Parallels the immodesty moral-panic article: both trace how elites lose monopoly control over appearance codes once mass production and co-option democratize them.