Haul Girls, Fashion, and Youth Subculture in the Digital Age

The Flaneur and the Haul Girl

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, 1964, pp. 9–10). The French poet could have taken these words directly from the mouth of a contemporary Generation Y "haul girl."

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

Haul Culture, Consumerism, and Community

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

"…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 exposure possible through the internet. Short of metal heads and emos, some experts insist that youth subcultures distinguishable by their manner of dress have all but disappeared (Petridis, 2014). Indeed, the conspicuous consumption so unilaterally detested by counterculture youth in the 1960s has been elevated today to a key indicator of belonging and one-upmanship. Caustic critics have dubbed these adherents bobble-headed consumers, while those with more entrepreneurial perspectives appreciate the marketability of social media fashion guru-ism.

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 through the ubiquitous provision of still image and video selfies.

Subcultural Capital and Judgments of Taste

Cultural capital — or, more precisely, subcultural capital — is earned by making distinctions from, and being disparaging of, the mainstream; it is the measure and manifestation of the worth of an 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 as in the depiction of haul girl gurus and celebrities.

The visual material culture conjured by haul girls must continually undergo change in order to present up-to-the-minute style and novel products (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004). Social positioning and judgments of taste go hand-in-hand with 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, but it's certainly happening online. 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).

Mainstream and Counterculture Poles

From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that girls with lifestyles and looks as disparate as Bethany Mota and Molly Soda both attract large followings. Mota is the mainstream haul girl exemplar and, as such, she earns roughly US$40,000 each month from YouTube advertisements. Her counterculture alternate, Molly Soda, appears to represent a distinct subset of the haul girl subculture. It is difficult to pin down 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).

A video of Soda reading her email for eight hours was recently sold at auction for US$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 Soda has created, 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, p. 18).

An operative feature of the haul girl's online performance is the capacity to remain distanced from the chosen audience while simultaneously remaining accessible through digital social media connections. This attribute accords with the metropolitan attitude that researchers of urban and cosmopolitan culture describe, and is also a familiar aspect of the post-modern posture toward art, literature, performing arts, and fashion (Hebdige, 2008; Hodkinson & Deike, 2005; Huq, 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 (Huq, 2006). Yet the artifacts of haul girl practice are essentially mainstream; indeed, they represent an exaggeration of mainstream wealth, access, and privilege. How, then, are haul girls understood as a subculture rather than simply an extension of the self-referential, narcissistic Generation Y?

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 the differentiation between the two forms of social contact. That is to say, virtual communication seems more real-time than ever before, and there is near-universal acceptance of virtual exchange as a substitute for in-person social interaction.

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 that social media network participants hold with one another: a primary reason for using social media is to express one's individual activities, accomplishments, and preferences — in essence, to provide a running commentary and chronicle of one's own lifestyle. To this end, Bethany Mota and Molly Soda provide bookend references for all who aspire to this contemporary, largely urban tribe.

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