British sociologists have had a longstanding interest in youth subcultures. However, they have tended to focus very much on working-class subcultures and avoided engagement with more exclusive subcultures of elite social groups. Recent sociological research (King and Smith 2018), however, has tried to address this omission by looking at how the high street clothing brand Jack Wills serves to mediate connections with elite social networks for young people drawn from the English public schools.
The researchers developed ‘close connections’ with their subjects using ethnographic techniques with 40 prominent individuals in this young ‘Jack Wills crowd’ at colleges and universities (interactions were recorded in fieldnotes), 18 of whom were formally interviewed.
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