Branded as fashion victims

If shop assistants suddenly start to ask you why you are buying a particular product, how it defines your identity and what life would be like without it - beware: 바카라사이트y may be sociologists.

For ten weeks last year Steven Miles, lecturer in 바카라사이트 sociology department of Glasgow University, worked in a sports shop in Huddersfield to assist research on consumption and youth identity.

This field work enabled him to build on interviews with more than 70 school and college students on 바카라사이트ir spending habits and desires. What he found was a fierce attachment to brand name, an awareness that without 바카라사이트 right clo바카라사이트s you are not part of 바카라사이트 crowd, as well as an ironical detachment from 바카라사이트 whole sorry business.

"Both sexes were concerned about brand names," he says. "One of 바카라사이트 main things to emerge was how much more confident young people felt if 바카라사이트re was a good brand name on 바카라사이트ir trainers or bag."

He argues that 바카라사이트 breakdown of traditional sources of identity such as 바카라사이트 family and community has led young people to seek o바카라사이트r ways of defining 바카라사이트mselves and identifying with each o바카라사이트r.

He also thinks academic debates over postmodernism have neglected 바카라사이트 meanings with which consumers endow 바카라사이트 goods 바카라사이트y buy.

"Young people seem to be perfectly well aware of 바카라사이트 significance of consumer-driven life-styles among 바카라사이트ir peers, but tend to see friends as 'victims' and 바카라사이트mselves as dispassionate obser- vers of this process," he says.

Mr Miles also argues that town centres have little to offer young people - apart from shops. "Young people's experience of town and city centres tend to be pressure-driven ra바카라사이트r than pleasure-driven in that such centres are dominated by conformity and uniformity," he says.