Roles???

Yesterday I had a design history class where we watched a documentry about teenagers in the late 50s/60's and into the early 70's.

It showed you views from adults who were in their teens during these periods and what they felt about certain fashions/subcultures/people, and it also showed some clips from these decades, from the teens at the time, and what they felt about their life and what their parents felt about there behaviour. The documentry was interesting really and the views expressed had quite similar connections. Being that teens were seen as 'things' in their own right. (and also something which I didn't know but should have - the fact that Teddyboys were seen as a kind of threatining group, maybe because they seem to stick together like an army, maybe there dress sense scared some people??) They had there little goups to hang about with. A good quote from the documentry has to be a woman commenting on people in the street and how you could put them into a specific group and reinforces how fashion works, 'you could recognise who somebody was by their clothes that they were wearing'- this again highlights the groups and specifies them in a way and it also shows their 'roles' in society.

During the afternoon, I had a chat with our lecturer, Steve and we were talking about the documentry and we got into a discussion about subcultures and the fact that they had certain roles to conform to....or that they just wanted to conform to. There are such things as subcultures and groups, be it teens, goths, skaters, teddyboys etc (and this is still present today) but it seems in these groups they have smaller groups within i.e goths to emos, goths to glam goths etc... and each group has these different roles that they have within the bigger group.

Then my very last lecture we were speaking about the model vs the pose and we came across again, the role that a model has. The lecture was really interesting, you began to understand that the role of a model is necessarily not to just sell clothes, or be a 'coathanger' they are actors in their own right, and from my previous blog, My favourite model being Lara Stone, she is a typical model to really show how the role of the model has changed drastically from the early 20's to now. She is a chameleon. In a shoot she doesn't seem to just pose, she acts.

So with all this information from yesterdays lectures it really got me thinking about roles of different kinds of people...the role of the photographer, the role of clothing, the role of a mother, of a child, the role of a parent, the role of a magazine editor, a fashion designer etc..... It seems throughout time roles have changed drastically-why?