Sunday, September 16, 2007

Street Culture: This is New Rave

Born in UK last year, New Rave turns up in the rest of Europe, Japan and USA. The codes of the street culture are dressing in neon colours , hyper energetically gesturing and talking with a lot of exclamation marks!


Every street culture movement is given a name by someone or other. Often it is the media that desperately tries to find a term for something inexplicable, thus creating the trend by themselves. That is why New Rave, which originally emerged from musical backgrounds, was named by the undeniably British music magazine, NME. As you might already have expected, the name is a spoof of the popular 80’s “New Wave” music, but literally meaning at the same time.

We know it hurts the eye but flamboyant fashion in fluorescent colours is one of the essential elements of New Rave. As usual, some journalists already predicted the arrival of fluorescent colours in town last year, and obviously their forecast wasn’t all that far off. As you might spotted on your city’s streets, pink and yellow fluorescent colours popularised by the New Ravers are spilling over into major brands! Not surprisingly, the street wear movement caught the haute couture’s attention: So, for this 2007 autumn/winter collection, cosmic-patterned dresses and jumpers were presented by Jeremy Scott. He happens not only to be Madonna’s costume designer, but also released a 12″ full of Electroclash for the New Yorker label A Touch Of Class. Even Martin Margiela famous for his graceful style has announced capes and shoes in fluorescent colours.


New Rave was not only responsible for pouring the idea of “fluorescence” into the world of fashion, this trend also invoked some strange visual phenomena in recent music videos. For example, look at this bizarre sequence in the Klaxons’ clip Magick: There is fluorescent green fluid spurting out of the band members’ eyes. Okay, this is obviously a citation of 70’s and 80’s horror flicks of the gruesome kind. But still, it so New Rave to turn the spurting blood into something fluorescent green… and it really manages to look disturbing enough!

Thanks to Pingmag

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

the next sound is Post New Rave:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=7374199

3:27 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

it is nu rave

9:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

there is some connection between this style and M.I.A.'s style. amongst streetstyle bloggers, she is a bit of a icon for a particular look.

5:08 PM  
Blogger l3m4nt said...

Niyi and Namalee ... saw them a while ago over here in Ghent :)

4:01 PM  

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