In his seminal analysis of post-war England Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige casts new light upon the stereotypical images of the impoverished, undereducated, and overneglected youths who were the driving forces behind England's subculture surge. At first glance these anarchic youths seem impossibly distant from my classmates and me. Sitting in an independent school classroom in Houston, Texas, we assume that only raging youths mistreated by "the system" could be capable of committing "crime[s] against the natural order" (Hebdige 3). Sitting at her desk, a St. John's student may reach down to her "vintage" tote bag/backpack, check her cell phone for any missed calls, pull up her argyle socks and think that raw rebellion was a thing of the past. However, after examining the student environment at SJS from a sociocultural perspective, I posit that, with regard to youthful "resistance through style" (Hebdige, 18), the past is now. Students at St. John's, whether we acknowledge it or not, are the fuel behind rebellious energies against the administration, our version of "the system." However, the essence and mindset of those immersed in the SJS subculture is dichotomous and multiplanar when compared to the subcultures in Hebdige's Subculture. While those British subcultures, especially the punks, were straightforwardly oppositional toward anything mainstream and "normal," the SJS subculture lacks this uniformity of direction. The SJS subculture, at its core, is both rebellious and reactionary. Students selectively choose their battles; at times they lash out at the administration, and at other times they uphold what is expected from upper-middle class teenagers and students of St. John's School.

One way that a St. John's student commonly rebels against the system is through his or her external appearance, mainly his or her attire. At SJS girls wear one of two prescribed skirt patterns and a mandated blue or white shirt from a local uniform distributor; boys wear the shirts with khakis or khaki shorts. We feel the need to mutilate (a vicious word, but that is, in essence, what we do) our uniforms because we so deeply feel that our clothes reflect our style and that our uniform betrays that style. The uniform itself is a token and tool of the rebellion. Hebdige emphasizes both the "'transparency' (the taken-for-grantedness) of [the] meaning" of a subculture's choice of signifiers (Hebdige 91), and the assertion that "commodities are indeed open to [...] 'illegitimate' uses" (Hebdige 18). It is not the uniform itself that we are scoffing as we defy the handbook by wearing non-authorized accessories, undershirts, or jackets; rather, it is the conglomerating, institutionalizing, and normalizing force that provides the reason behind the uniform.

Another reason we violate the uniform in our pursuit of rebellion is that the uniform is ultimately just clothing. This seemingly mundane assertion has two important implications. The first, and more obvious, is that clothes almost always catch the eye of a beholder first, a fact which works both for and against the students. It works for the students in that the uniform's violation provides no ambiguity in ascertaining the student's disapproval of the dress code. It works against the students in that dress code violations are by far the number one reason for students to receive a Detention Hall, according to a past issue of our high school newspaper, The Review. The gesture allows us to declare our revolt without verbalizing it. Without vocally acknowledging our blatant and intentional violation of the dress code we force the "social order" (in our case, the teachers and administrators) to be the first to verbally acknowledge our insubordination, thereby revealing to us the social order's disapproval of our rule breaking. The uniform in its altered state says what we want to say. On the other hand, our rebellion's temporary. The clothing items with which we "unique-ify" ourselves are the most easily removed and transient items of clothing: hats, scarves, socks, shoes, sweatshirts, and jackets. While we convey our subversion proudly through clothing, we ultimately find comfort in the fact that it is removable and thereby mutable. (For multiple reasons, SJS students usually eschew more disruptive forms of rebellion like piercings and tattoos. We prefer, I would argue, a subtler sort of sedition.)

In his account of the Mods, who made their mark on 1950s and 1960s Britain, Hebdige writes, "[...] the Mods were subtle and subdued in appearance: they wore apparently conservative suits in respectable colours [...] The Mods invented a style which [...] concealed as much as it stated. Quietly disrupting the orderly sequence which leads from signifier to signified, the mods undermined [...] conventional meaning[s]" (Hebdige 52). This is basically what the typical SJS student does. He or she takes mainstream articles of clothing and juxtaposes them with the required uniform. Only at St. John's would a black long-sleeved turtleneck sweatshirt--almost the epitome of a mainstream conservative accoutrement--be seen as something bad and punishable. Why? Because, despite its normality, it is being used in the wrong way. It is not being worn by a mainstream conservative individual, but by an individual who is "breaking the law." By wearing normal clothes when they are unexpected or forbidden, students create an unverbalized but textualized revolt against the system. The same applies for the untucked shirt phenomenon that, according to teachers and administrators, plagues our school. While the Mods' appearance pushed "neatness to the point of absurdity" (Hebdige 52), there is no doubt that an untucked shirt is messy. However, the concept of taking something normal, such as untucked shirts, and employing it at an inappropriate time for the sake of rebellion is a similar move.

Walking around St. John's School this winter, one would see the following articles of clothing being donned by students: leg warmers, scarves, beanies, coats and jackets of heavy material, mittens, galoshes, furry ski boots, long underwear, argyle socks (not so much part of the winter attire for their warmth, but for the "coquettish, academic" character of the Scottish pattern [Cox]), and maybe even a pair or two of earmuffs. On my visit to Boston this February, I was amused to see the same items being worn by Bostonians, when the temperature difference between Boston and Houston was a good twenty to thirty degrees. I realized how much we SJS students were imitating (whether knowingly or not) high school and college students in New England, an area of the country one usually identifies with orthodox scholasticism and traditionalism. In our rebelliousness, we are embracing another region's conservatism. This turn to New England became even more apparent when I examined the founding of St. John's School. Our school was "patterned after a New England academy" (Hartwell). Whether we knew it or not, our rebellion was pushing us towards the conservative end of the spectrum in terms of attire and external appearances. Moreover, we are reminded of the transparency and illegitimacy of our subculture's signifiers. We are in Houston and we are bundled up like we are awaiting a snowstorm.

The significance of this dose of social conservatism lies not the fact that we are walking around in scarves and beanies in a semi-tropical, climate; rather, it serves as an example of what Hebdige calls bricolage: "[W]hen the bricoleur re-locates [a] significant object in a different position within [one] discourse [...] or when [those objects are] placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed" (Hebdige 104). We have used conservatism in our own revolutionary wardrobe coup d'etat. We have, according to Hebdige, exercised the role of mainstream society in the original context of Bostonian traditionalism by labeling and redefining the signifiers of that culture--the scarves, the ski boots, the beanies--for our own purposes. We appropriated another subculture's signifiers and, in the process, turned those into new commodities. By being instrumental in the "deshockification" of certain things and the recycling of those things to shock others, the SJS subculture, like the post-war British punk subculture, is "steeped in irony" (Hebdige 63).

A second means by which St. John's students subvert the system is through technology--mainly the iPod and the cell phone. Both represent distractions and alternative sources of stimulation that are small enough to go anywhere and be hidden from teachers and administrators. The fact that almost every student carries a cell phone and leaves it on and unsilenced during school hours despite the fact that the handbook distinctly says "no cell phones" is, once again, an assertion of one's freedom to be available to the outside world during school hours, when we should ideally exist within the school's physical and intellectual boundaries. The iPod carries the same significance. Just like the cell phone, the iPod represents a means by which students can escape the SJS environment instituted by teachers and administrators while still physically existing in that environment. Almost everyone at SJS owns and carries with them either an iPod or some other small mp3/music playing device. Such devices allow us to exchange one mental locale for another.

But what is this other locale? It is mainstream consumerist culture; in other words, "the system." We rebel from one system and turn toward a larger one. Hebdige claims that "[w]hichever item opens the amplifying sequence, it invariably ends with the simultaneous diffusion and defusion of the subcultural style" (Hebdige 93). The irony arises in that SJS shows that Hebdige's assertion can be reversed and still remains true--the diffusion and defusion of a particular element of subculture style (the iPod and cell phone in mainstream culture) can be the amplifier in another context (the iPod explosion at St. John's). While Hebdige implies that amplification always comes before diffusion (the object must shock before it becomes commonplace), at SJS the iPod phenomenon occured in the exact opposite direction--the object became commonplace before it began to shock. Moreover, the fact that it became commonplace before it became a tool for rebellion is /why/ it is shocking and rebellious from the frame of reference of the SJS administrative "system." Whereas Hebdige seems to concentrate on assimilation being the cure for the object being used by the rebellion as a shocker, at SJS the assimilatory and ubiquitousness of the object is the instigator and not the cure. The significance of the iPod-cell phone aspect of the SJS subculture has two facets to it:

(1) It has been revealed that multiple systems of acceptability and standards against which the SJS youth subculture is measured exist, and
(2) SJS students embrace a mainstream culture, "the contemporary commodity culture" as a form of rebellion.

Our school's mascot, once the Rebel, is now the Maverick. Either name is amusing because my classmates and I tend to be so mainstream. Or are we? We rebel against the administration and, as odd as this sounds, ourselves. We are almost self-contradicting in that we revolt and in doing so situate ourselves in a mainstream culture from which, according to Hebdige, we should revolt but do not. The dynamic of subcultures and the systems from which they deviate is not linear; rather, it is an entangling web that allows subcultures to find themselves under the scope of a new system, under the scope of multiple systems, or in the unclaimed space between systems. It is important to note that it would be impossible for me to analyze the sociocultural phenomenon of SJS if I were either completely alienated from or completely immersed inside it. The SJS subculture's fluidity permits this freedom to understand multiple systems, which I hypothesize is something unique to the subcultural phenomenon at St. John's School.

Works Cited
Cox, Daniel. Fashion Designers: CMMI FALL/WINTER 2004 : MINIMIDIMAXI MAGAZINE. MINIMIDIMAXI LTD. 17 Mar. 2005.

Hartwell, Edward M. Handbook of Texas Online. PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL EDUCATION. 8 Mar. 2005. Texas
State Historical Association. 15 Mar. 2005.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1979.

Nicole Bedros is a senior at St. John's School, Houston, TX.

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