Is manipulation by the media killing British youth culture?

Has Britain's media killed the golden gosling of our tribal youth culture by its relentless obsession with identifying the next big thing? Ted Polhemus fears it has, and he should know.

As the most famous chronicler of the youth movements that have made this country globally known as the trailblazer of street style, Polhemus believes it's pretty much all over. Young people, he says, are not only tired of being pigeon-holed and categorised by journalists, marketers and advertising agencies, they don't even want to be identified by their age at all.

Polhemus has just been commissioned by international style magazine Issue One to investigate whether youth culture still exists. "If the media continues to try to market to them as 'Yo! You young people there!' there is nothing that will drive them away from your product or your publication quicker," he says. "There are so many journalists and marketers whose careers depend on spotting the next youth cult that, at some point, they are spotting things that aren't there."

As Britain's young style leaders run for cover, doing all they can to create individualistic looks that defy categorisation, the epicentre of youth tribalism has shifted to Japan.

"The media are such a bunch of vultures and these tribes and street styles are delicate. As soon as they're projected onto the world stage they are damaged. The media has got excited about emos in the last few years," says Polhemus, a photographer and writer who is currently updating his social studies classic text Streetstyle. "People say 'You've got to have a big section on emos', but are there really kids that walk around and say 'I'm an emo'? My suspicion is that Britain is in a post-tribal age. There are emos in Mexico, and they fight with punks. In Japan, girls organise themselves into very serious subcultures, and would say 'I'm a ganguro girl' or 'I'm a mamba'."

In the internet age, cities less saturated with mainstream media are developing their own style identities, says Polhemus, citing Helsinki as an example, and in particular the website hel-looks.com. "My point is not the whole world will be flocking to Helsinki, but that there will soon be 100 similar places around the world."

Which means Britain is in danger of losing a position that has brought it economic and cultural benefits for more than four decades. Cover stories by global news magazines such as Newsweek about the Britpop phenomenon the Nineties helped to bring that about. "As soon as the media said London was the coolest city in the world, that's got to kill London as the centre of the universe," says Polhemus.

Still the British media tries to pigeon-hole the young, chasing their eyeballs and disposable income with an increasing desperation and using tactics that once bore fruit. Polhemus, who is 61 and writing a book about his fellow baby boomers called My Generation, says his peers delighted in being categorised. "We fell hook, line and sinker for a very simplistic Mad Men marketing concept of youth."

But the real fascination with youth in Britain began with punk. "Once upon a time the media was not all that interested in youth culture. It was only with punk that it realised just how many newspapers could be sold on the back of an extraordinary phenomenon. When punk first happened it wasn't called punk. We knew something weird was going on, but it didn't have a name," he says, before describing how journalists then pounced on the New Romantic movement that followed and prompted the launch of early British street style magazines such as i-D and The Face. "The term New Romantic I'm sure was invented by a journalist, not by a kid in a nightclub."

The hard-to-pin-down styles of modern Britain are partly a backlash against this media control, Polhemus believes. "One of the interesting things about the information age is that people think everything can be found on Google – but you have to have a name to find it, like the word 'punk'."

Polhemus curated the "Streetstyle" exhibition held at London's V&A in 1994. That event prompted one commentator to suggest that the exhibition itself signalled the end of British street fashion. "The comment raised hackles at the V&A," says Polhemus. "I thought it was a very good point."

Nonetheless he is a supporter and contributor to the PYMCA Global Youth Culture Archive, a London-based collection of still images, video, written accounts and music that documents the lifestyles, fashions and haircuts that have characterised the tribes that have so far come and gone.

Meanwhile, the marketers, journalists and modern day Mad Men continue their search. "They're taking a model of how youth culture worked in the Sixties and just re-imposing it on today's youth," says Polhemus. "But young people today are smarter. They have had all the marketing and the media hounding them and branding them as youth and they've said 'Hang on, I'm not just the year I was born in.'"

Unordinary People, Exploring British Youth Culture 1960-2009, The Royal Albert Hall, 21 April to 24 May.

The PYMCA archive is at www.pymca.com