Bedroom Culture and Fashion

The way in which teens adorn their online profiles parallels how they decorate other spaces and material objects that they control—school lockers, backpacks, bedrooms, and their bodies. The photomontage style that Gabriella, the 15-year-old from Los Angeles, uses for her binder mirrors how many teens decorate their lockers and bedroom walls. Teens have long stitched together media artifacts as a form of self-expression, placing them on spaces or objects that are connected to them.

Likewise, clothing and accessories have long been a way for teens to mark their identities in relation to cultural dynamics and people. As teens craft their profiles, they combine both of these practices, revealing the ways in which profiles are both like and unlike their physical counterparts.

For teenagers, and especially teen girls, bedrooms and their postered walls have long been a space where cultural participation and identity are manifested and media of all forms has played a central role in this process (McRobbie and Garber 1976; Steele and Brown 1995). McRobbie and Garber’s (1976) initial introduction of “bedroom culture” focused on the ways in which teen girls consumed culture, although critiques have emphasized that teens actively engage in cultural production in bedroom culture, especially when media is involved (Kearney 2006; Lincoln 2004, 2005). What teens create through their choice of decoration and memorabilia are both social spaces and self-representations (Lincoln 2004).

As teens move toward networked publics, they take bedroom-culture practices with them and networked publics can be seen as “virtual bedrooms” (Hodkinson and Lincoln 2008). Digital self-representations are equivalent to the bedroom walls where teens exhibit their identities and the social spaces that are created are both like and unlike bedrooms. Mixed media is used in both environments, but the media that teens use in bedrooms is primarily static, while the content they display on their profiles can be interactive, animated, and linked. It may be cheaper to display media on profiles than in bedrooms, but the time to find and combine such media may be much greater.

More than anything, the difference between bedroom walls and profiles is the scale of the audience. Teens may show their bedrooms off to their friends, but they rarely have the opportunity to invite their entire cohort over to see their decorations.

While the potential scale of interaction online is far greater than in a bedroom, Livingstone (2008) found that there is still an expectation of intimacy; teens

deliberately choose what to share based on their understanding of the social situation and technical context. Teens approach social media environments with a view of privacy that is primarily about having control over the situation (Livingstone 2006).

Quoting Giddens (1991: 94), Livingstone (2008: 471) reminds us that “intimacy is the other face of privacy.” It may seem paradoxical, but teens seek to be

simultaneously public to some audiences and private to others (Livingstone 2008:

471). In this way, they work toward a sense of intimacy and control that parallels bedroom culture. Many of the teens I interviewed noted that their bedrooms were

not quite private because their parents and siblings entered when they wanted, but at the same time, they felt as though these spaces were not quite public either because they had some sense of control and not just anyone could or would come walking in. With social network sites, teens may understand that they are visible to broad audiences, but they do not see their participation in networked publics as being universally public.

Social media does not necessarily replace bedroom culture, but it is sometimes a meaningful alternative, especially for teens who lack control over their physical environments. For example, after a talk I gave in New Jersey, a girl told me that she liked decorating her MySpace profile because it allowed her to be creative. She was not allowed to alter her bedroom after her interior decorator mother had designed it, but she could do as she pleased with her MySpace profile. She relished the

opportunity for creative self-expression and changed her profile regularly. While this is an extreme case of noncontrol, many teens are restricted in what they can and cannot put on their bedroom walls or in other spaces where they might have once marked identity. Many of the schools I visited no longer have lockers and many of those that do restrict locker decorations—“for fire safety reasons.”

Fashion is another site where control for self-expression is fraught. Clothing and backpacks continue to be a battleground, especially when it comes to schools.

Likewise, parents still try to limit what their kids may wear. Fashion plays a

significant role in the marking of identity (Davis 1992) and, as I will discuss in the

next chapter, status (Crane 2000; Piacentini and Mailer 2004). Teens use fashion to mark themselves in relation to each other (Milner 2004) and identify with social groups (Hebdige 1979). Clothing and accessories become tools for self-expression and teens dress themselves as a form of identity work. Yet while teens value

fashion’s symbolic opportunities for self-expression and identification (Milner 2004;

Piacentini and Mailer 2004), adults worry about visible markers of teens’ resistance to adult norms and reinforcement of social hierarchies. Dress codes are relatively common and often hailed by parents as healthy approaches to curb gang violence, status mongering, and conspicuous consumption. While fashion and its relation to status and peer groups is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, it is

important to note that fashion still operates as a key mechanism of self-presentation and it plays a core part in impression management.

As adults seek to control the ways in which teens can engage in acts of self-expression, teens seek out new spaces, including the Internet. Because profiles are both a representation of an individual and also a space for social interaction, the practices of self-expression that take place parallel both bedroom culture and fashion.