Overview

Consumption occupied a privileged place in the fabric of British society during the 1980s. From the lifestyle theories of market analysts to the spectacular changes in the high street, the world of goods became a critical factor in determining identity. In a ground-breaking work of cultural history, Frank Mort explores popular and commercial culture of the period, showing how the marketplace dramatized a series of pressing questions about sexual politics and the meaning of masculinity. The habits and behaviours of young men lay at the heart of the so-called consumer revolution of the decade. The rise of a distinctive breed of entrepreneurs drove this expansion of gendered commerce. Figures such as the fashion stylist Ray Petri, journalists Julie Burchill and Robert Elms and graphic designer Neville Brody joined forces with innovators from the spheres of advertising and marketing to create a plurality of identities for men. Mort sets these competing versions of the male consumer in the context of longer-term transformations in masculinity since the 1950s: from the persona of the gentleman to the figures of the yuppie and the gay flaneur. It was the new landscape of London's consumer society which opened the space for the emergence of 'homosocial' identities in the 1980s - a formation as important for the understanding of masculinity as more established categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Cultures of Consumption maps the interaction of gender, commerce and geography to produce a major narrative about late twentieth-century British society.

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9780415030519

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David Morley, Frank Mort

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