In Australia, mostly in Melbourne i believe there is a kind of culture of ppl around 16-24 or so, who are Metro’s, not the normal Metrosexual!
But they dress in bright coloured shirts that have a open V neck kind of look without a collar, but they open very far down to show the chest, and they also sometimes wear headbands, tight jeans, sometimes cardigan kind of tops aswell. and they hav a certain haircut (long fringe over their forehead and messy on the top/back) alot of ppl could call the Emo Haircut, becoz it is very similar but becoz the way they dress, they dont match Emos!
You regularly find metros at +18 Clubs, listening to Elektro/ House!
Im a BIT of a metro myself coz i love to go out with my mates to the clubs and all, and hav a sweet time, but im not as bad as some of these pics!
Anyway, what im asking is, IS THERE ANY OF THIS KIND OF CULTURE OVER IN ANY OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD? AMERICA?
We most definitely have that in America. We had a style called ‘glam’ back in the late 70’s/early 80’s, where guys began dressing like women, wearing makeup, etc. without being gay or anything. They could rock pretty hard, though.
Nowadays the metro subculture still exists here, but it tends to concentrate in a few areas rather than being spread around (i.e. you won’t see a metro at the grocery story, but you’re bound to see a few in certain clubs).
Among teenagers, it seems, there is a tendency to classify people based on their clothing and hair styles (outward appearance). And a corresponding tendency for these people to assume the choice of look has something to do with their personality traits.
I call this judging books by their covers. Also trying to be a certain book by wearing its cover.
If I think about it, it seems to me that within each of these groups (thinking back to my old high school days) were a wide range of personality types, likes, dislikes, etc. So the question to me is whether you have to dress like the people you want to hang out with to feel you fit in?
Let’s look at clowns as an extreme example of a “look.” You certainly don’t know a person because they are dressed as a clown. Here are some examples:
A volunteer at a children’s hospital, donating his or her time
A professional entertainer heading to a birthday party
A much higher-level professional entertainer who does circus or stage shows
A hobbyist clown who does it for fun
A hobbyist clown who does it as an escape from who they are the rest of the time (you see many of these at clown conventions; no different from the doctor who spends his weekends as a leather-clad Harley rider)
A child molestor or bank robber
An expert acrobat, juggler, magician, physical comedian
A person with no skills at all, just a costume
See, you know almost nothing about the person by looking at their outward appearance. All you know is what they may want you to think about them based on their choice to look this way.
They are uniforms. If a non-conformist (Goth) person is trying to say they don’t want to look like everyone else, how come they go to great lengths to look like all the other Goths? It’s a uniform.
Be yourself.
The people I hang out with tend to wear helmets and leg armor, relatively expensive shorts with padded crotches, and T-shirts that talk about our common activity. They all like to ride unicycles, but beyond that they’re as different as any two other people you might meet.
Belive it or not i was a goth for several years. It always irks me when people point out the seeming discontinuity of goths dressing that way ‘to be different’ but still looking like all their mates. It’s true that ‘goth’ dress conforms more or less to a formula, else you wouldn’t be able to define it with a name, but dressed as a goth you still look vastly different to most people, and to all of the poeple that you want to differentiate yourself from. Consider this, if i put on a soldier’s dress uniform i would be in a rigidly defined uniform, worn by a group of hundreds of thousands, but if i walked down the street I would still look substantially different to everyone else. The thrill of dressing that way comes from being different to people’s expectations of you, particularly in my case as I’m not typical goth material. I’m off to a Cradle of Filth concert next week and no doubt it will be filled with hundreds of teens dressed in black, with make up on, spikes, maybe fingerless gloves, new rock boots and black leather trench coats, but this is an exception. If I started going to lectures next week dressed in this manner it would certainly cause comment.
You wanted to differentiate yourself, not from other people, but from the way most other people looked, right? But you didn’t want to look “different,” you wanted to look Goth. Hence the Goth uniform. If you wanted to look different, you would have to look not-Goth. But as you said, then there wouldn’t be a name for the way you looked and your lack of a uniform would keep you from being “classified.” Wearing the Goth “uniform” was safer, perhaps.
I suppose that would depend on how we were dressed at the time…
As to how I dressed in the late 70s, I’d rather not say. Ecch.
haha all these responses except dudewithasock aren’t really answering the qstion but thats alrite…
i have a different look as to clothes being a costume u wear to fit in…
I wear the clothes that i wear because i like them and i think they have trend! Not because im trying to fit in, i could be referred to as a metro in some cases, but Metro, comes from the term Metrosexual. which is a guy who is more intouch with his feminen (not spelt right) inside, a guy who could seem gay, but isnt!
When u look at it now days, u could call most of the male generation of today metrosexuals, because men are becoming more in tuned with fashion and hairstyles and alike than in the past…
This topic has gone way out of the Title qstion now hahaha
I would have to say that that depends on where you live. I have never seen anyone dress like that in Prince Albert and only a couple of times in Saskatoon. If you were dressed like that in the west flat you would get your @$$ kicked. People here dress very practically but that might have to do with the fact that the poverty rate here is way higher than the national and provincial average.
I have a pink shirt but i wouldn’t wear it west of 2nd av.
haha yea this maybe true for other places in the world, but australia, mostly melbourne, and prolly sydney and qland, it is more than normal too see ppl dressed like this walking around, and not standing out!
To steal a phrase from Mikefule, I resemble that remark
But only sometimes. In my cycling kit nobody would ever know.
Back to the “Metros”… I haven’t noticed people dressed that way round here - to be honest most of those pictures look stereotypically Australian to me (sorry :o), and the rest are extras from Zoolander.
