“Swag’s the full package”: hip hop aesthetics, social positioning and contemporary youth culture

This paper explores the role of clothing and embodied dispositions, popularly referred to as “swagger”, within the ways that young people position themselves in relation to each other. “Swagger” is a popular term within contemporary youth culture that refers to the performance of style, involving knowledge of what to wear and how to wear it. “Swagger” is also closely associated with urban grime music and hip hop culture, and as such can be seen to signify classed, gendered and racialized positions. Drawing on in-depth field notes and focus group data from an ESRC funded study with a predominantly Somali sample of teenagers in a Northern English city, this article empirically demonstrates the centrality of “swagger” within everyday processes of ‘racial’, spatial and classed positioning. The argument shows that, through a critical reading of signifiers like neighbourhood and accent, respondents distinguished between what they interpreted as ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ appropriations of “swagger”, (re)defining and (re)constructing distinctions between themselves and ‘rich people’, who were also imagined as ‘white’. This article contributes to the emerging field of hip hop studies, alongside extending contemporary sociological studies of youth culture, consumption and identification, which have largely neglected the politics of “swagger”.