Metropolis, Fashion, Society Metropolis, Fashion, and Society

In his portrayal of the flaneur, Baudelaire captured the essence of youth: the striving to be different, to be seen, and yet not be seen. In his words, the flaneur "enjoys the excitement and anonymity of, in particular, life on the city streets…to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world" Baudelaire, 1984, 9-10). The French poet could have taken these words directly from the mouth of a contemporary Y-Generation "haul girl."

Fig. 1. Haul Girl selfie.

Photograph: YouTube

This essay provides a brief exploration of the youth subculture attempts to answer the question as to whether the individuality of haul girls and their equivalents are expressed through the steady stream of purchases made -- clothing, fashionable jewelry, and accouterments such as music and decor -- and through the " that enables optimum positioning of one's status and uniqueness within the larger metropolitan population.

Veteran young shoppers who post videos on YouTube and other platforms that feature the haul they made while shopping are known colloquially as haul girls. These haul videos are seen by the youth who produce them and view them as cultural statements reflecting their lifestyles, not as illustrations of how much discretionary money the haul girls have or simply to show off. The capacity of the haul girl to curate a collection and the creative aspects of the haul videos, such as music and visual arrangements, contribute to the status and following of the haul girl (Hodkinson & Deike, 2005; Hug, 2006). That this is so indicates that the videos are as much a form of entertainment as were episodes of the television show "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." One London-based haul girl puts it this way: there is a community of people that,

"...turn the camera on because it's a way to talk to people without having to go outside and face their fears. I know that was the case with me: I turned on my camera because I was at home, signed off work, sick, and really bored. And it helped with my confidence in a way. There's this community where you can talk to like-minded people" (Petridis, 2014).

The diverse youth cultures of the past half-century seem to have been watered down or completely washed away by a tide of consumerism made all the larger by the vast and complete exposure possible through the internet. Short of metal heads and emos, some experts insist that youth cults who are distinguishable by their manner of dress have all but disappeared (Petridis, 2014). Indeed, the conspicuous consumption that was so unilaterally detested by counterculture youth in the 1960s has been elevated today to a position as a key indicator of belongingness and one-up-manship. Caustic critics have dubbed the subculture bobble-headed consumers while those with more lucrative lenses appreciate the marketability of social media fashion guru-ism.

Fig. 2. Fashion and lifestyle guru, Bethany Mota. (2014)

Photograph: Bryan Bedder | Getty Images for Clear Channel

The internet has substantially altered the way people congregate, and youth have not been immune to this influence. Rather than always gathering in person, digital natives connect via texting and social media networks -- and the ubiquitous provision of still image and video selfies (see fig. 1).

Fig. 3. Haul Girls. Photograph: YouTube

Cultural capital, or more to the point, subcultural capital, is earned by making distinctions from -- and being disparaging of -- the mainstream is the measure and manifestation of the worth of the alternative subculture (Bourdieu, 1984; Thornton, 1995). Bourdieu introduced the notion of social capital, explicating that social position has a profound influence on judgments of taste (1984). Indeed, Bourdieu considered judgments of taste to be acts of social positioning, in and of themselves (1984). Moreover, Bourdieu held that judgments of taste must reconcile the subjective perspective and experience of the individual with the pressures and influence of external society and its structures (1984). Rarely is this phenomenon manifested as clearly and well as in the depiction of haul girl gurus and celebrities (see fig. 2 and fig. 3).

The visual material culture conjured by haul girls must continually undergo change in order to present au courant style and novel products (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004). Social positioning and judgments of taste go hand-in-hand what Dr. Ruth Adams of King's College London refers to as "the cycle of production and consumption," which has achieved unprecedented speed and changeability. Adams explained,

"Fashion and music, they're much cheaper and they're much faster today…It's not necessarily happening on street corners any more,...

It's a lot easier to adopt personas online that cost you absolutely nothing apart from demonstrating certain types of arcane knowledge, what Sarah Thornton called subcultural capital" (as cited in Petridis, 2014).
From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that girls with lifestyles and looks as diparate as Bethany Mota (see fig. 2) and Molly Soda (see fig. 4) both attract hordes of followers. However, Mota is the mainstream haul girl exemplar and, as such, she "hauls in" roughly US40,000 each month from YouTube advertisements. Her counterculture alternate, Moly Soda, is the poster girl (grrrl?) seems to represent a subset of the haul girl subculture. It is difficult to put one's finger on Soda's desired image. She is deliberately as changeable (and colorful) as a chameleon or a character fond of socializing with the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland (Muggleton, 2000).

Fig. 4. Moly Soda, Tumblr Girl guru.

Harbinger of a new subculture?

A video of Soda reading her email for eight hours was recently sold on action for U.S.$1,500. Soda is such a popular social media personality that a farcical Tumblr webpage features only Soda wannabes, and Urban Outfitters blogged about how to achieve the Molly Soda look. With this glimpse into the individualistic world created by Soda, one is reminded of Simmel's assessment that, "the metropolis places emphasis on striving for the most individual forms of personal existence -- regardless of whether it is always correct or always successful" (2010, 18).

An operative of the haul girl online performance is the capability to be both distanced from the chosen audience and to yet to be accessible through the digital social media connections. This attribute is in concordance with the metropolitan attitude that researchers of urban and cosmopolitan attitudes describe, and is also a familiar aspect of the post-modern posture toward art, literature, performing arts, and fashion (Hebdige, 2008; Hodkinson & Deike, 2005; Hug, 2006). Within post-modern subcultures, there is typically evidence of some degree of rejection or separation from the mainstream: this is fundamental to the subculture (Hug, 2006). Yet, the artifacts of haul girl practice are essentially mainstream; indeed, they are an exaggeration of mainstream wealth, access, and privilege. How, then, is it that haul girls are seen as a subculture and not simply an extension of the self-referential and narcissistic Y-generation?

A similar argument can be applied to subcultures in general. An element of exaggeration regarding some banal characteristic or acceptable practice common to the mainstream culture is observed in any subculture (Hebdige, 2008; Hodkinson & Deike, 2005; Hug, 2006). It is the degree of exaggeration or the length of the extension of the quotidian that defines the subculture or counterculture -- and even an haute couture fashion statement (Hebdige, 2008; Hodkinson & Deike, 2005; Hug, 2006). This principle is evident in the counterculture lifestyle expressions of the Molly Soda try-hards, who must, in order to distinguish themselves from the original Molly Soda, select features of Molly's style, attitude, or expressions of irony that they will exaggerate beyond anything their guru has yet expressed. In so doing, they become an unwitting caricature of the very persona they choose to emulate. In this shared iteration of an ideal, speedy changes of alliance and expression provide a dizzying and dazzling display of taste and tastelessness, that eventually looses the very individualism that held the original appeal -- and that supported the coalescence of a new youth subculture.

Conclusion

It is not entirely possible to separate the social media platform dynamics from the subculture of haul girls, as a fundamental aspect of belonging to the subculture is participation in social media and widespread exposure in digital environments. The internet supplants face-to-face interactions in many areas of social life, but for haul girls the social mechanism is the media, and the media conveys the meaning of their curated world. Moreover, the media is once removed from real-time existence, although the virtual world increasingly exhibits an immediacy that reduces differentiation between the two forms of social contact. That is to say, virtual seems more real-time than ever before and there is near universal acceptance of virtual as a substitute for real-time social exchange.

There is an element of narcissistic behavior in the haul girl subculture that seems utterly to escape its acolytes. In large part, this is due to the widespread psychological contract social media network participants have with one another: a main reason for using social media is to express one's individual activities, accomplishments, and preferences -- in essence,…