ABSTRACT
Lifestyle is not a term which has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within a plurality of possible options, and is 'adopted' rather than 'handed down'. Lifestyles are routinised practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity. Each of the small decisions a person makes every day - what to wear, what to eat, how to conduct himself at work, whom to meet with later in the evening - contributes to such routines. All social choices (as well as larger and more consequential ones) are decisions not only about how to act but what to be. The more post-traditional the settings in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking. (Giddens 1991: 81)
Theoretical and empirical discussions of consumer culture, lifestyles, the mass media, popular culture and youth culture are intimately connected to more fundamental philosophical and ontological questions concerning subjectivity, societal and cultural change and the meaning of life. The terms 'lifestyle' and 'identity' are currently in vogue (Featherstone 1987). They are used as conceptual tools for trying to grasp how societies and individuals are changing. In post-traditional societies lifestyle has become an issue for most people and, as Giddens points out, the more post-traditional the settings in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity.
