One of the most distinctive features of visual culture during postmodern times is the disaggregation and heteroglossia of dress codes and styles. The wide range and quality of fabrics, trims, colors, silhouettes, and particularly stylistic modes as well as the broad array of accessories spanning the spectrum from footwear and headdress to jewelry and hair style display an unprecedented openness and fragmentation in the history of post-Enlightenment Western clothing conventions. This is not to deny the existence of a fashion system complete with highly articulated rules and codes against which innovation, convention-breaking, revolt, reinflection, contradiction, and pluralization take place. Within the field of cultural studies these and related propositions are illustrated most memorably in Dick Hebdige's classic book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which, it will be recalled, charts the differing styles during the l960s and 70s of teddy boys, mods, skinheads, Rastas, and especially punks in relation to both the historical conjuncture of mainstream hegemonic culture and the contentious constellation of various male subcultural groups in England.In postmodern culture, youth styles often combine dress with argot, dance, and music, creating shocking ensembles set against the reigning symbolic order; style is a way of being and resisting. Innovation in fashion is less a matter of creativity ex nihilo than of mutation and pastiche. Punk fashion, with its torn tee shirts, orange hair, safety pin piercings, necklaces of toilet chains, plastic pants with multiple exposed zippers, and mask-like makeup, effectively demonstrates not only the simultaneous systematicity and disorganization of late twentieth-century dress codes, but the spectacularized heteroglot visual culture characteristic of postmodern social regimes.