[giraffe_lady]

Yes that is exactly how it works, there's a lot of literature on the subject. Any genuinely transgressive movement has its aesthetics, but not necessarily its values, repackaged as a consumer identification and subsumed into the mainstream of the culture.

Grunge is a good example but the same thing happened to punk a generation earlier. Consciousness-raising sessions and second wave feminism quickly became unilever marketing cosmetic products using the language of empowerment. Pride was originally the first anniversary of a riot but now JP Morgan and the cops themselves are comfortable putting out a rainbow float. etc etc etc there are thousands of examples.

Anything that's visually recognizable as transgression will be commoditized until it's no longer transgressive. Many many cultural and art phenomena are downstream of and in response to this mechanic of consumer capitalism.

[flir]

I'm gonna say punk's the odd one out there, because Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were there at the heart of it with SEX right from the get-go. So the time-to-commercialization on that one might actually be zero, or possibly negative, which gives it a slightly different character.

(I can see the other point of view, which is that Westwood was a nobody until consumerism took her and her designs to its bosom).