Skinhead

Youth movement characterized by a high level of aggression: shaven heads, bomber jackets decorated with images of skullsand threatening writing, and big boots often reinforced with steel toe caps. The movement originated as a reaction to the middle-class hippy movement in England in the mid-1970s. Socially, its reference point is the working classes in industrial cities, but it took only a few years for the political extreme right in England to exploit thousands of young people whose only point of social and cultural reference is the skinhead movement. The phenomenon spread throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe. In Germany, skinheads have been completely taken over by the neo-Nazis. In other countries, Italy among them, odd groups of skinheads remain who refuse to associate with the far right and adhere instead to the original cultural and social references of the movement. In some cases, they adopt the stylistic urgency of the original movement, especially in music, which was that of a counter-culture and had nothing to do with the right, with, for example, black Jamaican music or English ska.