Cure fans.
 
The first time I saw someone dressed-up to like one of their cultural idols it was a young lad, no more than fifteen, wearing white denim, white shirt, red braces, a bowler hat, with a natty black umbrella parading with a swagger and a menace outside the ABC Cinema, Lothian Road, in Edinburgh, where they were screening A Clockwork Orange. He was obviously a fan of Alex, or maybe one of his droogs. Within a few months of this, and on the same stretch of road, came a gaggle of female Bay City Rollers fans stomping in their six-inch platforms decked out in white half-mast bags with tartan trim and white short-sleeved shirts with similar plaid detail, holding scarves above their heads while singing “Shang-A-Lang.” It was almost religious. Young girls out evangelizing the heathens about their mighty gods.

Then came the long-haired trench-coated prog rockers, the punks, and button-downed mods and new wave rockers. If you stood long enough on any high street you would see the fashions come-and-go just like Rod Taylor did in The Time Machine when he watched the window display of a shop opposite his laboratory change year-by-year as he hurtled into the distant future. According to ye old fictional textbook Pop Psychology for Beginners, dressing-up like your pop idols is about expressing your individuality and a way for youngsters to find like-minded people to share their interests and experiences or a favorite band/singer/pop group/artist/dictator.

Between 2004 and 2011, photographer James Mollison documented many of the different pop music subcultures and their fans. He traveled across Europe and the U.S.A. with a mobile photographic studio which he parked outside various music venues and then invited an assortment of fans to come and have their picture taken. When he had enough, he put all these different portraits into one composite picture. He called the finished series of photographs The Disciples. These pictures capture fascinating moments of pop culture history and something of how our search for individuality inevitably leads to conformity. See more of James Molison’s work here.
 

Fans of Bjork.
 

Motörhead fans.
 

Missy Elliot fans.
 
More fab pix of the usual fan suspects, after the jump…