Lifestyles

Life style is a means of shaping the individual self by creating cultural and aesthetic forms that consciously or unconsciously express personal identity. The issue surrounding lifestyle is therefore posed as the question of how individuals manage to give a universal form to their individual being. One’s body, clothes, speech, leisure pastimes, eating and drinking preferences, home, car, choice of holidays, amongst other things, can be all considered indicators of the style of an individual. A number of social, biological and environmental determinants can render life style more than just the resultant of the individual’s psychological traits. Postmodern consumer culture has created an incentive to new “life styles” to drive the consumption of new commodities as a factor in class distinction and construction. Life styles oscillate between the need to express inner self-consistency and the surrogate of identity propagated by the culture industry.