23 - Fashion and Youth in Western Societies

Summary

Abram Dayton was unequivocal that, in the 1830s, the Bowery Boys (or B’hoys) of his native New York consciously adopted a distinct dress style, quite different from that of ‘the centre of fashion’, Broadway. Named for the street over which they reigned in lower Manhattan’s Five Points neighbourhood – ‘a hell-mouth of infamy and woe’ – the Bowery Boys were labouring men, many of them apprentices, who took great pride in their appearance. Nineteenth-century cities teemed with young people and the Bowery Boys are but one group of urban youths that, lacking the personal or vicarious status symbols of elite peers – money, profession, property, family pedigree – used distinctive dress and transgressive behaviour to challenge and differentiate themselves from the mainstream, express identity, assert agency, and show group allegiance. And while a uniform dress style potentially erodes individual identity, for many of the young people discussed in this chapter, personal identity was centred on membership of a particular group and the visual advertisement of this through adoption of the group’s dress style.