X-actly!: Izikhothane - A subculture born

Izikhothane

A subculture born

Mphuthi Mpho

Ever walked around and observed how people are dressed as you walk past? It is interesting to see that although everyone has put together their different looks, somehow there’s a visible link that runs through some of the outfits that catch your eyes as you walk around and subcultures are responsible for this.

What is a subculture?

In case you’re wondering, a subculture in fashion refers to a group of people embracing a specific way of dressing as part of their wardrobe and thus extinguishing themselves from the rest of the society through their taste in fashion. However, a lot of people choose to experiment with fashion by embracing different subcultures to avoid having a monotonous look.

Take grunge for example, it all started in the 90’s when the USA was experiencing financial hardships. Inspired by the state of their nation, the people worked with what they had. It can be easily characterised by elements of punk put together with jeans and plaid fabric with a flannel shirt being a staple look for this subculture.

Local is lekker!

For many years, fashion has always been about uniqueness, individuality, being able to express oneself with clothes or better yet communicating to the world who you are through clothes. It is with no surprise when a group of young boys emerged from the South African townships dressed expensively in Italian brands contributing to what would later become a subculture in its own right.

As the nation witnessed young boys forcing their ways into looking the part of being ‘iskhothane’, coming from homes that can barely make enough, a subculture was born. Many ridiculed it as being crass and stupid, but to them it’s all part of the game, the game of fashion as they put it, showing off how much money you have.

Although it started out as art in 2006, a group of young boys coming together to dance to keep themselves entertained, it later became about fashion. Like many other subcultures out there, it was met with a negative response, much like Punk and Goth.

The game evolved from just dance moves known to them as battles, then later fashion came into the picture and together it became a new subculture - Ikhothane.

As the dancers became more aware of their outfits, somehow they realised that dance alone couldn’t get them to win these ‘battles’. As part of the dance ritual – the battle, they would boast the worth of these expensive fashion items and the crew with the most expensive itemsr would obviously win the battle, sometimes it would go as far as them burning their belongings to show their battle opponents that they can afford to play the game and live it!

Whatever the reasons of these young boys spending outrageous amounts of money, what we have is a fashion subculture meets dance and there is no denying its existence.

Here a typical Izikhothane battle is seen on a Nando’s ad