My magazine is aimed at a group of people known as 'Indie'. Indie means individual, and therefore meaning that 'Indie' people tend to want to be different from the mainstream and want to be their own person - individuality. The image above is someone who would be classed as Indie, due to his style of wearing skinny trousers, boat shoes etc. Indie people tend to be young; teens to mid-20's. Usually any Indie person shown in the media tends to be young and it tends to be in adverts for clothes shops, e.g. topman, river island etc. This is because Indie is a fairly popular genre at this present time, the fashion, I would say, is a lot more popular than the music. You would expect most late-teen's boys to be dressed the way the boy in the picture is. When it comes to sex, Indie is equally divided, whenever an Indie person is used in the media, it could be male or female.
Due to Indie people being younger, they tend to be unemployed, or seen to be unemployed, and if they are employed it will be to a job that has not very high importance, or requires little skill or knowledge, e.g. till worker at Tesco. Therefore the majority of Indie people are seen to live off and with their parents. The majority of Indie people are likely to be in higher education; college, university. They are likely to study; Media Studies, Photography, Graphics, Art; as these are seen as 'Indie subjects' - subjects that you would fully expect an Indie person to do.
In the public eye, Indie people are seen as growing to be common. I believe the Indie genre to have peeled off of 'Britpop' when it died out, therefore it has been growing slowly since then and has now reached its peak, with Indie bands constantly in the charts. However some male Indie people can sometimes be assumed to be homosexual, due to the Indie fashion sense. This is due to things like; skinny jeans, very short-sleeved t-shirts etc. As an Indie person takes great consideration into the way they dress, this could be used against them in the argument of accusing them of being homosexual. However a section of Indie people tend to be portrayed as; tree-huggers. This basically means that they care for the environment and are trying to reduce the impact us humans have on the Earth; Global Warming.
In tv and film, Indie people are portrayed to be cool and mysterious. For example; in the channel 4 tv drama 'Skins', they basically follow the lives of a group of young people who would be classed as Indie, and the view we get of their lives shows us that these people's lives are all about sex, parties, getting drunk and doing drugs. A massive stereotype of, not just young Indie people, but young people as a whole. A stereotype put in place by the older, middle class people who write newspaper articles and create news stories. This stereotype is also shown in Indie music videos. Where the videos tend to consist of young people partying, getting drunk and, sometimes, having sex.
Indie is the most working class genre of music you could come across. Such bands as; The View, The Arctic Monkeys and The Wombats are all Indie. You can indentify this through their lyrics. For example; The Arctic Monkeys sing "and how you like to aggrovate the ice cream man on rainy afternoons'. Which, I think, gives us a wonderful image of a council estate, with a flock of children huddled around an ice cream van on a drizzly dull day. Now on how many middle-class suburbs do you see that? Also, location has a big impact on Indie bands, they all tend to be from Northern heritage; as the North is considered working class. For example; 'The Arctic Monkeys' are from Sheffield, 'The Wombats' are from Liverpool and 'The View' are from Dundee.
I believe I kept my Indie readers intrigued and I maintained their culture by advertising gig guides, revealing the line-up for a festival and having a q&a with an artist within the genre.
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