ABSTRACT
Dick Hebdige argues that the styles are neither arbitrary nor necessarily a substitute for politics or engagement with the ‘real world’. Sub-cultural styles reinterpret conflicts of the wider society: in the case of punks and skinheads, it is racism. Blacks, and other ethnic minorities, have also developed their own oppositional styles, but these have usually had a conscious and deliberate message. The word ‘zoot’ came from the urban jazz culture of the 1930s, but the origins of the style itself are uncertain, and several explanations have been suggested, but it seems possible that the style was first developed by the second-generation children of migrant Mexican workers. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s a variety of distinctively black styles developed, some wholly oppositional, some combining styles adapted, for example, from Africa, with western fashions. The Afro-Caribbean fashion for beaded and plaited hairstyles originated in adaptations of African styles and asserted a pride in African descent; they may also reinterpret western styles.
