Youth cultures and style. Analytical approaches and a methodological proposal

Abstract

Youth cultures are nowadays one of the main social forms among young people, and at the core of youth cultures is style. Variously defined, style is made up of all those elements through which each youth culture, and every individual involved in it, expresses itself and positions itself with regard to other cultural models, by processes of identification, distinction and recognition. Over time, different approaches to the analysis of youth cultures have been developed – on the basis partly of the different empirical phenomena which have been taken into consideration, and partly of the different sensitivities of the scholars – and thus different interpretive perspectives of style have also emerged. The article aims at reconstructing the core elements of the main approaches to style in the study of youth cultures – considering definitions, constitutive elements, and interpretive models – and then, on these bases, at reflecting about a possible methodological path in the concrete study of today’s youth cultures’ styles.