ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines that most delicate but resilient of connecting tissues between cultural and criminal practices: style. As will be seen, style is considered here not as a vague abstraction denoting form or fashion, but as a concrete element of personal and group identity, grounded in the everyday practices of social life. Style is in this sense embedded in haircuts, posture, clothing, automobiles, music, and the many other avenues through which people present themselves publicly. But it is also located between people, and among groups; it constitutes an essential element in collective behaviour, an element whose meaning is constructed through the nuances of social interaction. When this interaction emerges within a criminalised subculture, or between its members and legal authorities, personal and collective style emerges as an essential link between cultural meaning and criminal identity …
Style defines the social categories within which people live, and the communities of which they are a part, [serving] as a ready and visible medium for negotiating status, for constructing both security and threat, and for engaging in criminality … Style defines the lived experience of ethnicity, social class, and other essential social (and sociological) categories … Ethnicity and social class reside less with skin colour or dollars than they do with participation in various collective styles; they emerge from socially symbolic stances that locate individuals and groups in the larger society. In the moments of lived experience, styles becomes the medium through which social categories take on meaning.
