Part 4: Travel is the Genesis of the Subculture

This is the fourth in a five-part series I’m writing about how subcultures are built and this essay is free to read for those logged in. Read the rest here. This week we breeze through some of the subcultures and spaces that millennials and above have created that younger generations may find interesting. 

Building brands today is really about building worlds so Niamh Donoghue and I are hosting The Worldbuilder Show on The Stack World, where I'll do more a weekly deep dive into building a brand world and my process. But before we start that, I wanted to sort of show how I look at the process of trends rising and falling.

Every subculture begins with a journey. Someone leaves home, encounters something new abroad, brings it back, and sparks a chain reaction that mutates into something bigger than themselves. Sometimes it’s a single protagonist — a DJ, a designer, a kid with a suitcase of records. Sometimes it’s a crew. But the pattern repeats: departure, return, mutation, explosion.

You can trace it across decades of cultural history.