ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 traces the conditions of possibility for lifestyle’s emergence as a cultural form. The late 1950s saw a resurgence of interest in Max Weber’s work on “life-style” in sociology, and this, coupled with a shift toward social psychology research in advertising, led to the growth of Values and Lifestyles (VALS) market research that utilized lifestyle as a framework for reaching segmented groups of consumers. The chapter shows how “lifestyle” helped advertisers and journalists frame difference in the changing landscape of American society during the postwar period. Drawing on Stuart Hall, the chapter frames “lifestyle” as a discursive formation that ran throughout print media—in newspapers, magazines, and advertisements—in the late 1960s and 1970s. These discourses were found in articles about African Americans, gays and lesbians, and the hippie counterculture, which framed these groups as having distinct “lifestyles,” as well as in the accompanying advertisements that drew on “lifestyle” to attract upscale consumers. This chapter argues that lifestyle hinged on ideas about social difference and social distinction, and that the latter subsumed the former as the concept took hold in popular media culture. Initially deployed to denote a threat to civic society, “lifestyle” was rehabilitated by advertisers and social scientists in the process of incorporating those threats into nascent consumer markets.
