Flea market, Birgu, Malta (2013)

“The flea market ethos, like many countercultural values, paid its respects to a modernist notion of prelapsarian authenticity. In an age of plastic, authentic material value could only be located in the “real” textures of the preindustrial past, along with traces of the “real” labor that once went into fashioning clothes and objects. By sporting a while range of peasant-identified, romantic proletarian, and exotic non-Western styles, students and other initiates of the counterculture were confronting the guardians (and the workaday prisoners) of commodity culture with the symbols of a spent historical mode of production, or else one that was  “Asiatic” and thus “underdeveloped.” By doing so, they singled their complete disaffiliation from the semiotic codes of contemporary cultural power. In donning gypsy and denim, however, they were also taunting the current aspirations of those social groups for whom such clothes called up a long history of poverty, oppression and social exclusion. And in their maverick Orientalism, they romanticized other cultures by plundering their stereotypes.” – Andrew Ross

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