XEROX DROP 0.1
What is Cultural-Aesthetic Alternativity? This work aims to answer that question by exploring the history of the evolution of alternative cultures in the late 20th century, specifically their origins and developments in what is now Western Europe.
Transgression and Music-Aesthetic Alternativity
We aim to examine the construction of collective memory, identifying significant moments in its evolution and the key aspects of these subcultures, and how they are reflected in broader narratives of that history. Building upon this premise, the research focuses on the language most closely associated with musical groups that defined and shaped their own subculture, such as Bauhaus, Joy Division, or Siouxsie and the Banshees, classified within the Gothic and Darkwave transgressive movements.
The Gothic and Punk counterculture movement emerged as a subgenre label for several bands in the post-punk movement in the UK in the early 1980s. Since then, it has survived and globalized as a cultural practice associated with being alternative and transgressive.
We analyze the importance of fashion and style within this movement, demonstrating how this aesthetic has had a symbiotic relationship with alternative and transgressive fashion trends. The primary and immediate origin lies within the broader communicative alternativity aesthetic operating in the 1980s in the UK. In this alternative scene, wearing black was already a marker of being alternative, transgressive, and resisting mainstream culture. Band black t-shirts were easy to wear and projected one's taste, belonging, and community to those who recognized the band's name.
We apply a perspective on how these movements could be reinterpreted today and how gender roles were already addressed in their context, offering greater permissiveness and fluctuation of hegemonic codes, borrowing styles from Elizabethan, Victorian, or medieval periods, and often expressing pagan, occult, or other religious imagery.
The Gothic and Punk counterculture movement emerged as a subgenre label for several bands in the post-punk movement in the UK in the early 1980s. Since then, it has survived and globalized as a cultural practice associated with being alternative and transgressive.
We analyze the importance of fashion and style within this movement, demonstrating how this aesthetic has had a symbiotic relationship with alternative and transgressive fashion trends. The primary and immediate origin lies within the broader communicative alternativity aesthetic operating in the 1980s in the UK. In this alternative scene, wearing black was already a marker of being alternative, transgressive, and resisting mainstream culture. Band black t-shirts were easy to wear and projected one's taste, belonging, and community to those who recognized the band's name.
We apply a perspective on how these movements could be reinterpreted today and how gender roles were already addressed in their context, offering greater permissiveness and fluctuation of hegemonic codes, borrowing styles from Elizabethan, Victorian, or medieval periods, and often expressing pagan, occult, or other religious imagery.