The Country Gent and the Urban Subculturalist on Instagram: Imaginary Geographies, the National Past and Polysemy in British Heritage Menswear Brands’ Branded Content

This paper presents initial findings from an investigation into the intersections of craft, place and nostalgia in the marketing of British heritage brands. Drawing on cultural historian Patrick Wright’s (1985) idea of the ‘national past’ as a public staging of history, it looks at how British brands define themselves as ‘heritage brands’ through a mobilisation of an idea of ‘pastness’. The paper employs visual discourse analysis in its study of promotional images drawn from heritage brands’ Instagram accounts. The Instagram accounts analysed are those of the menswear-focused British brands Barbour, Fred Perry, John Smedley and Loake. The brands are polysemic (Hall, 1980) in their overlapping and sometimes contradictory class meanings; they mobilise both their original aristocratic meanings as brands selling business and leisure clothes to gentlemen, and the ‘subculture capital’ (Thornton, 1996) derived from their ‘expropriation’ (Fiske, 1989) by working-class subcultures. Key to these brand narratives are imaginative geographies (May, 1996), locating British heritage brands in the kinds of locales that Wright associates with the nostalgic imagining of the national past: the urban backdrops of Victorian city centres, the rural idyll of country paths and the man-made wilderness of heathlands. This paper argues that in an age of globalised mass production, by locating the brands in such locations the brands are drawing on nostalgia for the community cohesion and local manufacturing traditions of the national past. For both those brands that still manufacture in the United Kingdom and those that no longer do, these ‘commodity aesthetics’ (Haug, 1986) of place work to produce an association with craftmanship directed at ‘craft consumers’ (Campbell, 2005) and an association with tradition aimed at fashion-sceptical menswear consumers. Furthermore, this ‘recuperation’ (Clarke, 1976) of the youth subculturalists’ stylistic innovations places him within the British national past alongside the more familiar figure of the country gent.