[pyrale]

> But it’s obviously not rare and counterculture if Walmart is ordering a million “Yas queen” t-shirts and selling them in 25k population cities.

So, in a nutshell, counter-culture can't exist because of fast-fashion?

I believe we should separate the ability for commercial brands to provide products to increasingly small market segments, and acceptance of sub-cultures that these products are marketed to.

[mcpackieh]

More likely, counterculture has decoupled itself from clothing fashion. If your counter-cultural uniform is being sold at walmart, then it's a farce. The real counter-cultures have moved on and no longer care about what kinds of clothing you wear. On the internet nobody cares if you have regular jeans and a tshirt, or an elaborate outfit of leather straps and metal chains, face tattoos and 50 nose piercings; such outward expressions of "counter-culture" have all gone mainstream and become corporate products. The real counter-culture, if in fact any still exists, is expressed through words and deeds, not what clothing or music you buy. People who try to buy their way into a counter-culture at a clothing store are simply mainstream posers, usually aping a style their parents' or grandparents' generation innovated with... and then commercialized.

In 2023, somebody dressing like a punk or a prep means nothing, they both buy their clothes from the same stores and probably have the same mainstream ideas and values. Their preference for clothing style is no more meaningful than somebody's preference for vanilla, chocolate or strawberry icecream. These kind of preferences don't indicate any kind of counter-culture.

Furthermore, niche subcultures aren't counter-cultures. Subcultures exist within some greater cultural context, they don't stand apart from and oppose that greater 'mainstream' culture. To be counter-culture, truly, you need to transgress against the mainstream culture. Simply having unusual niche tastes doesn't cut it. There is no average man, everybody is unusual when you consider enough factors[0]. Consider the intersection of all of your personal attributes you can think of, physical, emotional, historical, intellectual.. how many people exist in that set? Probably just you. It is this way with everybody. Possessing a very unique set of attributes isn't counter-cultural, it's the norm. Everybody exists in subcultures, even the counter-culturals have subcultures. Existing in a subculture is not what it means to be counter-cultural.

[0] In the 1950s, USAF researchers measured the physical attributes of their pilots, found the averages of those measurements, then found that not a single pilot was average across the board. Utterly average individuals don't exist.