Vivrant: Cultural dispatches and deconstruction

Hello.

Vivrant is a place for me to explore and share perspectives around this thing called culture. It’s a term that has become as throw away now as the other C word content but I hope through each post I publish we’ll together delve deeper into how culture impacts people, society, products and brands, and how culture is also driven by and evolves through the actions of people, society, products and brands. 

Some posts will be heavy deep-dives into a particular subculture or niche, some will be sharing the signals and shifts I’ve been seeing of late and what it could mean. While others may be more personal in sharing how culture has shaped my own identity and tastes, perspectives and thoughts. 

Just like culture, the evolution of this blog/newsletter/whatever we call these things now is fluid but over time I’d like to be creating research and deep-dive reports as well as documentaries across a wide range of topics in culture so stay tuned and hit that subscribe button to receive these regular cultural dispatches. 

What is Culture?

Culture is many things. It’s artistic output, it gives people meaning, it’s the pulse of an organisation and much much more. This is why finding the right definition that truly sums up all the elements of it is hard to pin down as even the great cultural theory writers, practitioners and lecturers have stated from Stuart Hall to Raymond Williams, Andrew Milner to Jeff Browitt.

We’re often looking at culture through two ways; around social behaviours or arts output. 

The Oxford Dictionary states the two as:

• the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.

• the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

The Cambridge Dictionary follows suit, just written differently.  

These definitions cover artistic output in a traditional sense - music, theater, art and literature as well as definitions on the rules (written and unwritten), behaviours and views of groups of people. It covers arts and humanities as well as human and social sciences. 

What you’ll see me write about is where the two meet and often influence and impact each other as for me culture is a way of life, whether behaviorally or artistically. 

Culture as an expression, whether an object, output or creation is the latest Kendrick Lemar or Drake diss track, this week’s Palace drop or a new Banksy appearing. Culture as guidance, whether it’s the beliefs and behaviours, codes and communities that shape our day to day experiences and identity from skateboarding through to a city's nightlife.  

I don’t think you can have one without the other as culture as an expression is influenced by those beliefs, behaviours, codes and communities. While cultural expression also impacts how that guidance evolves. From both, people gain meaning as their individual tastes and preferences develop to shape status and identity. It shapes what we like and who we are. 

Culture Shapes Us

So culture is something that surrounds us as a mixture of codes, signals, rules and output that shapes a way of life; it’s how we create identity and meaning for ourselves through beliefs, tastes and expression to how we act and behave in wider society like work, neighborhoods, communities, organisations, tribes, fan clubs, collectives and sports teams.

Everyone is shaped by culture in some way and we all contribute to it in various forms whether as a creator or follower of cultural output. 

Culture, how it’s shaped and evolves is always something that I’ve been interested in personally and professionally for as long as I can remember. 

Without realising it at the time but as a child I was surrounded by some of the biggest and most interesting subcultures in Mod, 2-Tone and Football Casuals through my upbringing. My parents were immersed in the Mod revival of the late 70s and 80s, which also led to crossover interest in the 2-Tone sound coming from the Midlands, which was influenced by West Indian culture. These subcultures also had an impact on the football casual scene which exploded on the terraces in the 80s.

For some, The Jam, The Specials or going to the match would simply be an activity, but for others it was much more than that, it was a way of life. The music you listened to mattered just as much as the clothes and brands you wore. The places you went to so you could live that life and be surrounded by like minded people were the lifeblood of these subcultures across the country.   

As I grew up and started to earn money I would revisit these subcultures of my parents along with finding my own subcultures I could call my own. Hip-Hop being the first one that made me relate to how my parents looked at the world of mod and how it influences the sounds you buy, the clothes you wear, the people you align with and the places you meet up. These key cultural artifacts, moments and movements influenced me as I started to express myself through them to shape my own identity. 

Culture doesn’t stand still 

As stated earlier culture is hard to pin down as one definition because it’s broad in what it entails. To complicate matters it’s something that doesn’t stand still and continues to evolve. With culture so fluid, it’s hard to neatly define it so while you might see some frameworks here from time to time, there’s no one size fits all roadmap to culture. But that also means it’s fun to dive into and make the connections, be curious to ask and seek out why certain shifts happen and niches form. 

Digital accelerated everything and algorithms have flattened culture so now everyone can seek out cultural inspiration and meaning at a scroll of a newsfeed to shape their identity and tastes that constantly evolve. It’s why we see more cores and aesthetics being spoken about now than new subcultures being formed because the latter doesn’t get the time and place it takes to form and evolve like well known longstanding and importantly pre-digital subcultures like skateboarding, mod and the casual movement had. On the flipside, subcultures were not always the easiest to access and fit in as you needed to go all in to align to the values, looks and sounds. Now it’s never been easier to find people sharing like minded passions. Beauty is in the niche. You can take inspiration here, dabble there. 

Flattening Culture

Before the digital acceleration you had to work harder to find your tribes, sounds and styles. This sense of discovery made the journey and act of connecting, buying, listening, sourcing and seeing more fulfilling. 

One of the key players in this journey were tastemakers or cultural connectors. The tastemakers of the time weren’t always perfect but their form of curation enabled you to connect with like minded people and find product and output through them. Now the platforms have replaced the tastemakers we’re stuck in the constant cycle of being fed taste cooked up by an algorithm. We have to think less. We don’t need to work so hard.

I think there is a danger in everything being so accessible, it can make the sense of discovery at times somewhat less fulfilling. We can already see the impact this is happening on output, cities and places as the excellent Filterworld book shows, or articles like the Age of Average have stated, it’s all starting to look the same out there.

When everything begins to look, feel and sound the same we tend to value it less. We need disruption, difference and distinctiveness more than ever in culture. 

It’s out there and we need more of it. More Kendrick Lamar’s and Little Simz’, more Safdie brothers and Emerald Fennell’s, more Honey Dijon’s & Benji B’s, more Jen Reid’s & Akala’s, more Rafael Leão’s & Jackson Irvine’s, more Walid Labri’s & Glenn Kitson’s, more Liquid Death’s and Wray & Nephew’s, more Inkie’s & Bambi’s, more Clark’s and Corteiz’s.  

These are just some examples that spring to mind of people and companies not following convention and algorithms in their respective fields to elevate culture. There’s plenty more out there and we need more like them. It’s become too easy to follow convention. To stick to so called best practices and algorithm tactics. It’s not lost on me that the moment I publish this I’ll be battling algorithms and making sure the title and social media posts are optimised to ensure they get their best chance of reach and engagement. We’re trying Jennifer. 

Unpacking Culture 

I’ve always been fascinated by how culture has shaped my own identity or others. It’s something that I’ve always tried to bring into a professional setting through different points of my career. No matter where I’ve worked or whatever brands I’ve worked for I’ve always tried to bring an understanding of people and the culture to the table to help shape how a brand can operate better when they want to become involved in culture. 

I think culture is still such a misunderstood area in a professional sense because it takes time to truly understand it and with resources and budgets squeezed and timings becoming shorter often brands and organisations look too short term and often think they can just tap into culture. Or they lack the understanding and just look at the topline.

This is where the danger lies and you make a Pepsi Kendall Jenner, a Puma Traphouse or even more recently the adidas campaign with the Munich SL-72 featuring Bella Hadid.

Research shows 63% of CMOs agree brands must create culture, not just borrow from it. But we must get better in understanding how it works in order to create value and a space in culture that participates in and adds to it, not tries to borrow its credibility. 

To do this we need better representation of people across ages, social backgrounds and ethnicities in organisations that want to become culturally relevant or help their partners do so. Culture shouldn’t be used as a marketing tactic or something to jump on like content marketing, digital and social media. You don’t just tap into it. You have to participate and contribute. Culture is a living and breathing, evolving feast of codes and contradictions, community and creativity. You need the right people to know the nuances and meaning.

In my day job people will stress it’s important to “stay on top of culture” or companies will boast of “operating at the speed of culture” and while it sounds impressive to say you achieve both, the reality is culture is now so fragmented no one can truly say they can cover and have answers for all. 

But what we can do is look for the commonalities and the often unwritten rules that are shared by the various subcultures & niche communities, trends & movements, aesthetics and cores to better enrich our understanding of the evolving feast that is culture and where identity, status and tastes all play a part. 

It is my goal writing here on Vivrant each week to explore those commonalities and unwritten rules and hope you enjoy the journey and it helps in your own cultural understanding. 

“…Of course culture isn’t everything. But culture is a dimension of everything. Every practice exists in the material world and simultaneously signifies, is the bearer of meaning and value. Everything both exists and is imagined. And if you want to play in the area where deep feelings are involved, which people hardly understand, you have to look at culture.”

Stuart Hall, Cultural Theorist