Vice Style

You thought that youth culture began after the Second World War, but it didn’t. In fact, the story goes back to the late 19th century, when urban gangs in American and Northern Europe began to attract outraged press attention through their behavior and dress: the Hooligans in London, the Apaches in Paris, the Scuttlers in Manchester, and the Hudson Dusters in Manhattan.

These street kids saw their flamboyant dress and bad attitudes reflected by the newly growing media, but they were in no way ideological. Another group acted differently. Beginning in Germany during the early 1900s, the Wandervogel—literally, wandering birds—rejected the onset of the materialist, consumerist, mass-production society in favor of researching folklore and tramping around the countryside.

After the First World War, the Wandervogel split into many different groups and factions, ranging from the proto-hippies of the Ascona commune to the proto-fascist White Knights. After the Great Crash of 1929, Germany’s economy went into meltdown and—just like today—youths were disproportionately hit: Half a million adolescents wandered round the country in hopeless vagabondage.