Consumption, Identity and Style

There is increasing talk, as we head for the last decade of the millenium, of the post-industrial leisure society. Production is geared more and more to the consumer needs of a highly mobile and affluent society, which is largely unaware that its most intimate moments and private pleasures in consumer culture are constructions of a powerful and manipulative consumer market. Consumption, Identity and Style sets out to explore the role of consumer culture in the contemporary political economy. The relation of the individual to the world of leisure is not a simple one of self-determination: style, subjectivity, and the shifting identity of the contemporary consumer carry within them a set of meanings which work, through our consciousness and our everyday perceptions, on the politics of the age. Essays on the world of fashion and the foodies, on the market''s creation of popular reading or holidaymaking, on consumption in popular music, on television, and the dynamics of everyday life, offer detailed interpretations of our most accepted rituals and practices.