Reading (and Shopping) with Angela McRobbie

A reflection on the Birmingham School cultural studies scholar’s vision of girlhood.

By Rose Higham-StaintonMarch 2, 2026

• Gender & Sexuality

• Cultural Studies

THE PREEMINENT SOCIOLOGIST and cultural theorist Stuart Hall once wrote that, “as an area of serious historical work, the study of popular culture is like the study of labour history and its institutions. To declare an interest in it is to correct a major imbalance, to mark a significant oversight.” I was awakened to Hall’s ideas—the way that racial, class, and gender relations are present at every level of culture—as an undergraduate student in a British art school in the mid- to late noughties. It was Professor Angela McRobbie, one of Hall’s discerning acolytes, who gathered up his ideas and shaped them into something tangible for me as a young woman. I was first introduced to McRobbie when she took to the lectern at Goldsmiths College—which was her academic home then, and mine as an undergraduate student. Nearly two decades have passed, but her perfectly straight white hair, cut into a severe bob, her agile reading glasses propped low on the ridge of her nose, and her Glaswegian hilt are impressed upon my memory. These largely superficial details are important; McRobbie would be the one to teach me this. Her demeanor was angular but not severe, and she had a cool seriousness about her, one that she powerfully applied to “unserious” subject matter: teenage girls’ magazines, British drum and bass, vintage clothes, and shopping. After the lecture, we were split into seminar groups; I spent a blissful hour with one of McRobbie’s PhD students dissecting a Beyoncé video. Textual analysis was not new to me, but its application to my own girlish and fluctuating life experience—what McRobbie called “girls’ culture”—was revelatory.

I had arrived at Goldsmiths a few years before, despondent and apathetic. Like most middle-class kids of my generation, it felt like the only real options presented to me were university or something definitively vocational. Without an aptitude for science or maths but with a vague facility for words, I applied for courses across the humanities. In 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Labour became determined to get 50 percent of young people into degree courses, transforming the university from a place of academic rigor and defined outcomes into what McRobbie calls “a mass social and cultural experience,” predicated on a new kind of cultural economy and knowledge but often lacking any clear direction, of which I was an exemplar. By the time I arrived at university, Blair was already losing favor, and unlike the Cool Britannia of the 1990s, the subsequent decade appeared wishy-washy, culturally ill-defined, endlessly unsure of itself. This is also how I felt personally: I was neither a winklepicker-wearing indie rock devotee, a Home Counties boho “rah” (public school–educated and probably horsey), or a middle-class “scally” from the fine art course. I watched as the R & B of the nineties and early noughties faded into something saccharine and poppy, and as the goths and indie kids hybridized into the unpointed, directionless aesthetic of “indie sleaze.”

It turned out there was a way to make sense of all this. The disaffection and fleetingness of youth was the stuff of cultural studies as I would come to understand it. As a discipline, cultural studies occupied a liminal space between sociology and English literature and was defined by research subjects “not considered legitimate” enough for either, as McRobbie puts it. McRobbie found her professional and critical start as a discerning acolyte of Hall, the Jamaican-born British founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, known to most as the Birmingham School. By McRobbie’s definition, the Birmingham School was not just a mode of thought or a body of research but also a moment in time, in the mid- to late seventies, when pop culture entered academia and became a legitimate subject of study. Hall authored or edited a number of seminal texts (most notably 1976’s Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, co-edited with Tony Jefferson, and 1978’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, co-authored with Jefferson, Chas Critcher, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts) on the intersection of race and class, and was, perhaps reductively, crowned the “godfather of multiculturalism.” As McRobbie, who was studying under Hall at the time, puts it, he positioned “race [as] the ‘modality’ through which class was lived.” Though class was central to Hall’s thinking, he considered it “both as lived experience and as an abstract category within Marxist thought,” according to McRobbie, “a category formed through the struggle for domination.”

While Hall’s brilliance was in bringing race into conversation with class, McRobbie brought class into conversation with gender, which, like race, complied with forms of domination. Since those early days with Hall, McRobbie has spent her academic career evolving the field of cultural studies by refracting it through her own experiences as both a feminist and a native of Glasgow, Scotland—“a staunchly working-class city,” she writes, though she grew up middle-class. Like her, I grew up middle-class, surrounded by music and magazines that were quietly predicated on constraining—through the production of images and ideals—the very social groups to which they were marketed. The social groups McRobbie was most interested in were girls and young working-class women, subjects she explored in her early research on Jackie, a British girls’ magazine that ran between 1964 and 1993. For McRobbie, Jackie peddled an “ideology which deals with the construction of teenage ‘femininity’”—precisely the kind she sought to deconstruct. She does so by centralizing the teenage experience in her research, legitimizing it as an area of study, and then reimaging the time-space of teenage life as liminal and potentially radical. Operating between school years and working years, parental jurisdiction and the autonomy of adulthood, teenagers elude institutional control—which is perhaps why cultural studies has returned to them so often—as they loiter at the edges of playing fields or lounge in bedrooms. The peripheral space they occupy is particularly appealing to teenage girls, McRobbie writes, who as children and adults are confined to “safe” domestic spaces associated with femininity.

McRobbie’s early research into Jackie orbits a central theme and sets a precedent for her later work: “the seeming invisibility of girls and, alongside this, the permutations of representation when they became visible,” which largely focus on romance, love, and domesticity. I was one of many girls—generations of them—to whom, and for whom, and about whom McRobbie was speaking in her wide-ranging essays on secondhand shopping and bedroom culture. Although I have not returned to McRobbie’s work often, she is there every time I pull on the thread of some interrogatory idea. It was McRobbie who introduced me to the “cultural capital” of Pierre Bourdieu, the semiology of Roland Barthes, and the gender theory of Judith Butler. A desire to turn my material surroundings—clothes and surfaces, ecology, cultural phenomena—into a vehicle for exploring broader conceptual questions was born from McRobbie’s ideas, both in the classroom and in books like The Uses of Cultural Studies (2005). This was feminism that I could grip on to, with tangible near real-time examples.

McRobbie’s latest book, Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies: Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards (2024), was prompted by her departure from her full-time teaching position and research post at Goldsmiths in 2020. It traces McRobbie’s thinking about young women and class from the beginning of her career as a scholar and critic to the present moment. It is a book of two halves, beginning with four recent essays by McRobbie looking back at her earlier writing. The new essays provide a contemporary context for her early work on the “seemingly innocent and highly popular” world of girls’ magazines, the “capitalization” of subcultures, the “scripted” sexuality presented to girls by popular music, and the “social hierarchy” of vintage clothing, once deemed derogatorily as castoffs. The second half of the book is composed of the earlier essays, which begin in 1975, when McRobbie was “a post-graduate student and a young mother” living in the working-class neighborhood of Selly Oak in Birmingham, and span two decades, ending with “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds,” written with Sarah L. Thornton in 1995. She notes that she chose these seven essays because she found that they “still resonated” with her students all these years later. The pieces also amount to a set of persistent themes that continue to occupy McRobbie, loosely aligning with her time at the Birmingham School.

Like most academics, McRobbie has a tendency toward formula, but the book’s tidy division of old and new material turns out to be a useful frame for those intervening years and fits pleasingly with my own chronology. The period from the tail end of second-wave feminism through the mid-noughties when I was at university to the present is a time McRobbie urges us to fill with our own lived experience: permitting us to reflect on those viscous years of teenage rebellion, as well as the veneer of young womanhood. This, I think, is the driver behind much of McRobbie’s research: how, she asks, do we get young women to actively consume and challenge culture? “Our own subjectivity can often add to the force of research,” she writes. “Why should we not be able to admit how we absorb ideas and apply them”—she continues in “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action” (1981)—be it at the pub with friends, or in bed with lovers? In this polemic essay, she writes that “to maintain a continual flow of ideas, a cross-fertilisation of analysis and an ongoing exchange of descriptions, experiences and feelings, we need words.”

At the level of the page, McRobbie numbers the points in her argument before deliberating—“the purpose of this chapter is fourfold”—and this operates like a nervous tic or the residue of academic protocol. In her recent essay “Vintage: Fashion’s New Frontier,” McRobbie reminds the reader that when she started, “it was still academically unseemly to talk about selfhood (in any guise) and to suggest that clothes had an emotional power.” Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies sees a loosening not of McRobbie’s academic rigor but of academic style, a movement away from the structured form and economic prose of the original Birmingham essays (which, for their time and context, were also radically personal and straight-talking). The essays also offer a glimpse into McRobbie’s wide-ranging interests, as well as the sense that anything could be a text up for interpretation. In “Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket,” written in 1985, McRobbie demonstrates a close reading of a Kate Bush lyric and breaks down Patti Smith’s early outfits: “This cautious but somehow threatening androgyny had a much greater resonance than, for example, Diane Keaton’s very feminine take-up of the male wardrobe in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall.” When McRobbie returns to these ideas in her new essay, she does so with more of an “auto-ethnographic” bearing, scrutinizing her personal interest in the subject, both then and now, speaking anecdotally of vintage shopping in Glasgow in 1969. In doing so, she reminds us how our lived experiences divide and commingle across time and place, through perfunctory and persistent acts of living, like dressing ourselves.

Unlike a lot of cultural theory—say, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) or Sarah L. Thornton’s Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995)—that lingers on the veneer or image of youth subcultures, McRobbie drills down into process. In “Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket,” she turns to the largely unexamined “act of buying,” which in studies of subcultures often “disappears into th[e] process of transformation.” But before this work of transformation, of “dressing,” there is the work of buying and selling, often negated as “women’s work” and therefore “of little interest to those concerned with youth cultural resistance.” McRobbie recounts the dynamics of the high street and how women navigated this public space and private occupation within the context of 1980s Britain. She homes in on the public and social conditions of buying clothes, the active participation of girls, and how the “familiarity, community and personal exchange” of the street market released them temporarily from the boredom and confinement of domesticity. She praises fellow Birmingham School member and cultural theorist Erica Carter for having gone some way “towards dislodging the view that to enjoy shopping is to be passively feminine and incorporated into a system of false needs.”

Shopping also gains a new political dimension in the realm of “vintage” or “thrift,” which McRobbie argues is a class-defined aesthetic conceit. For her, this is also a way to theorize an act like shopping into the larger cultural and political questions around nostalgia. To borrow, as McRobbie does, from Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism, the “mass flight into nostalgia” has been lived not once but over and over again as a series of reconstituted and reproduced sartorial cues, which, in turn, risk reproducing the social order along racial and class lines. “Does the image of the middle-class girl ‘slumming it’ in rags and ribbons merely highlight social class differences?” asks McRobbie, before asserting that the sartorial appropriation of poverty in sixties hippiedom might be read as “an act of unintended class condescension.” In 1985, as in 2025, nostalgia, for McRobbie, represented a “loss of faith in the future,” producing a culture that “can only look backwards and re-examine key moments of its own recent history with a sentimental gloss and a soft focus lens […] with old images recycled and reintroduced into circulation as pastiche.”

I am reminded of the lanky and tousled-haired boys I knew at university in the mid-noughties, with their brogues and lithe Rolling Stones silhouettes. These boys dressed as an homage to, and parody of, their fathers. My classmates and I were all products of the boomers, who once touted anti-war and free-love ideals and idolized the androgynous (but hypermasculine) sex appeal of the Stones. Then we watched as our parents fell prey to the ideology and materialist trappings they once rejected. As Thatcherism and, later, New Labour peddled economic self-sufficiency via a crude erosion of the welfare state, our parents clung to the pedestrian safety of the salaried job, pension, and mortgage. My classmates worked at retro stores and American Apparel—retail spaces associated with youth subcultures and underground music scenes. On reflection, these hybridized styles and reimaginings of previous sartorial styles were not failures to “comprehend” a certain historical epoch but wishful anachronism. In 2005, as in 1985, secondhand dressing among the young was marked “by a knowingness, a wilful anarchy and an irrepressible optimism.” The nostalgia was not for a specific historic moment, McRobbie writes, so much as it was “for the days when youth culture was genuinely transgressive.”

It’s important to note that by the early 2000s, McRobbie’s research into magazines and other forms of pop culture was dramatically affected by the rise of the internet. The mid-noughties were defined by a burgeoning online stratosphere of blogging and social media platforms like Facebook, which were assuming some of the functions previously enjoyed by mainstream magazines. Tessellating between analog and digital cultures, the noughties produced an unwieldy mass of images and messages. Websites were not yet sophisticated enough to emulate magazines nor to fully reimagine them. And yet, returning to McRobbie’s early essay on Jackie unearths something new for me now. The name “Jackie” conjures an identity that is “British, fashionable (particularly in the 60s); modern; and cute,” she writes, with a “pet-form” ending of -ie that cements the image of a young girl as nonthreatening, even submissive. I was born Rose but was known as a child and young adult as Rosie. Returning to Rose in my early thirties was perhaps a rejection of not just girlhood but also the “particular values” held by it, the same kind that were reproduced in magazines like Jackie (or for an earlier generation, Judy, or for my generation, Just Seventeen), values belonging to “‘girls’ as a monolithic grouping.” Jackie was paving the way for a certain kind of life, to be continued later in the pages of Good Housekeeping or House & Home. The narrative arc of these magazines was dominated by getting a man and homemaking. In one of the recent essays in Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies, “The Girls’ and Women’s Magazine: A Disappearing Genre?,” McRobbie returns to Jackie in light of newer narratives and female archetypes. For McRobbie, digital and new media formats have not improved the lives of women and girls but held them accountable to new “values” and archetypes like the “high-achieving working mother” and the “resilient girl.” The former, she says, is “entered into through the (neoliberal trope) of personal choice,” itself a kind of illusion. We are “presented with positions, stances, bodily norms, ways of acting, ideas about selfhood,” but rather than choices, these accumulate to an ever-expanding range of categories: the “alpha” mother or the “girlboss” becomes a means of categorizing, and thus commodifying, ambition among women.

McRobbie also writes skillfully about the way popular music has reflected certain cultural trends or political movements. For me, the music of the mid-noughties felt ill-defined, and certain genres were in the midst of a takeover. By the mid-noughties, for example, R & B was under threat of becoming a mainstream commodity: an “overwhelmingly white” male-dominated industry that peddled bad boy infidelity (Usher, Nelly) and romantic aspirations (Ashanti, Ciara, and Kelly Rowland). In “Young Women and Popular Music,” McRobbie writes that, by the end of the decade, Beyoncé would begin to defy these categories, but in order to do so, artists like her and Rihanna would be “spectacularised,” meaning they would have “to stretch the racial stereotype of sexualised feminine difference as far as it can go” (this is a term borrowed from Stuart Hall). She calls this phenomenon “phallic girl”: an early 2000s “post-feminist iteration of female agency” in which female musicians were expected “to take up features of dominant and youthful masculinity” while maintaining “all the high standards of the mainstream beauty industry.” McRobbie makes the distinction between this predominantly white phenomenon and the expectation of Black women to be strong as a “mark of cultural difference.”

At the same time, McRobbie reminds us that it is not the reception of music so much as its production that reifies ideological control. “Mass culture is seen as a manipulative, vulgar, profit-seeking industry offering cheap and inferior versions of the arts to the more impressionable and vulnerable sectors of the population,” writes McRobbie. Music, however, has the potential to counter this, “as a sublimely popular aesthetic form that has also been a form of communal social care, a force of love, and system of welfare for black people,” thereby transforming those perceived as “the more impressionable and vulnerable sectors of the population” into agents and producers of culture. She also credits Hall, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, and others with changing the vocabulary around Black music and popular culture—“away from difference and from diaspora aesthetics” and toward an approach to music as “habit, feeling and muscle memory.” McRobbie, with her near-choral inquiry of fellow theorists and scholars, is strongest when she—or they—dare to imagine, or reimagine.

Perhaps that interrogation of everyday life is the thrust of cultural studies, bringing us “back to the home, the family, the bedroom, the church, the school, as well as the performance space.” The first few of these are spaces defined not by received knowledge but by personal relations, countering the exclusionary force of academic scholarship.

Reading McRobbie again—now, some 20 years on—feels closer to retrospection than nostalgia. From her essays, I gather not one clear image or historicized moment but imbricated layers of time and memory. When artifacts of highbrow culture, like works of art, age, they become “classic” or “seminal”; when lowbrow or mass culture does the same, it becomes “dated” or “out of step.” Thinkers like Angela McRobbie take the latter and hold on to it, both at its moment of conception and in its aftermath. Owing to its sheer volume and reach, she deems lowbrow, mainstream culture as a more proficient conduit for understanding the current moment. To assume McRobbie’s subjects—defunct magazines, blogs, disbanded musicians—obsolete is to misunderstand the very nature of cultural studies. Its power, and its necessary weakness, is in embracing the pace at which culture changes, demanding to be constantly reevaluated and rewritten. Subculture, McRobbie writes, “evaporates just as it crystallises.”

At the center of McRobbie’s ideas, and my own, is the girl; you, me, someone you know. She stands alone but spoken for. Girlhood is a “centuries-old cultural fiction […] for patriarchal capitalism to secure masculine domination across its institutions,” and McRobbie seeks to punctuate its immutability through the transient nature of cultural studies. Her evaporating subjects, wrangling hindsight, and unanswerable questions become powerful modes of resistance: a refusal—or inability—to be canonized.