Sub-cultural groups are sensitive to contemporary trends in fashion, style, and music.

Subcultural groups are large groups within a culture. For example, ‘hipsters’ is a popular group in our western society. Members of this group are usually young. They avoid most pop-culture things. They often wear clothes that you’d expect older people to wear such as plaid shirts, glasses, and cardigans. This group of people also like to do things that most other people don’t do. Such as using old technology, wearing vintage clothes, being vegan or vegetarian. These people are often artists, musicians, writers, or have other creative professions. This can make them hard to relate to for non-hipsters or people who aren’t interested in creative things.

Gration, Reilly, and Titford had the theory that people join groups to fulfil common needs. One of the needs that would be fulfilled from being a hipster would be communication with others, because within the hipster community there would be a lot of ways to communicate, most hipters use apple products and would use instagram or pinterest to communicate. Another need would be able to be with people who share a common interest or purpouse, within this social group there would be many common interests such as fashion, art, theatre, and books or writing.

The hipster style is usually a cynical performance. Most people could easily find traits of hipster within themselves but it would be easy to latch on to this and then try to be more hipster than what is natural. Having a cynical performance can be a successful defence strategy, this is because there is less possibility of getting hurt if there is not much of your true self being shown.