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When removed from any temporal or spatial verities, the commercial representations of youth acknowledge the contradictions in and ambivalence of this stage of maturation and turn angst, rebellion, and even nihilism into desirable commodities. By mapping these psychological conditions specifically onto a young body, the market forces create what Lawrence Grossberg descrives as a “topography of desire” (484); that is, a site from which ideological or political struggle is elided, reducing the body to a purely superficial or external referent. The debate which occured in the late 1990s surrounding the production of “heroin chic” is an example of the fetishization, trivialization, and commodification of young people’s ideologies and fashion choices by a particular market. By reconstructing and exteriorizing the psychological complexities of heroin use into a “look,” the fashion industry created a desireable and uncomplicated product: Where young people could don the facade without the associated dangers of drug use. This marketing strategy turned antiestablishment behavior and possible drug addiction into a maligned fashion statement and, in th e process, commodified the debates surrounding youth, drug use, and the fears of older generations. The binary oppositions of right/wrong, good/bad, and young/old were played out not as ethical or moral debates about addiction and potential social consequences, but as commodified ideologies. Once again, the binary oppositions that uphold establishment practices and relegate youth beyond the margins were reaffirmed.

In Foucauldian terminology, heroin chic was an instance of use value being submerged into appearance value (Finkelstein 112). If young people looked as if they were on drugs, then the logical conclusion was that they were, because, as Joanne Finkelstein argues, appearances are fashioned and seem to reveal the political and social positions of those who adopt a particular “look” (105-12). Nonetheless, the flexibility of expressing the self through a look like heroin chic was denied to youth: First, it was a created phenomenon, appearing as though it emerged from the margins, and second, because of the panic it aroused. Heroin chic was condemned by the U.S. president of the time, Bill Clinton, who said that “you do not have to glamorize addiction to sell clothes” (quoted in Blanchard 2), linking the look with the behavior and implying that by moderating one you will control the other. Needless to say, the fashion houses found another look to exploit.

One of the ironies in the youth market and its associated products is that while young people may think that they are resisting the dominant culture by adopting a particular mein or lifestyle, t hey are, in effect, sustaining the commercial viability of the commodification of teen spirit. This contradiction is evident in nearly all youth commodities - even when the young people are producers of the representations themselves. On the one hand, young people take an active role in the production and distribution of “youth” (through the creation and successful marketing of music, theatre, and film) while, on the other, they purchase and consume the images that both mainstream and alternative markets create. When attempts are made to realistically represent young people’s voices and diversity, they are tolerated to some extent by the dominant culture. However, hegemonic forces ensure that these alternative models of representation and modes of discourse are contained within their own liminal spaces - alternative music scenes, ‘zines, and, more recently, cyberspace (Giroux 35).

— “Nothing Sells like Teen Spirit: The Commodification of Youth Culture,” pg. 4-5