Linking the scholarship of British Cultural Studies with Henry Jenkins’ work on participatory culture, this chapter investigates the potential meanings of youth (and adult) engagement with practices of mass consumption. The discussion draws on the scholarship of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which argued that the working-class youth subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s (for example, mods, punks, skinheads, teds and rockers) were involved in practices of ‘stylisation’ which subverted the intended meanings of mass-produced consumer items, turning them into collective forms of resistance to cultural hegemony. This theory is, in turn, challenged with reference to ‘post-subcultural’ scholarship from Sarah Thornton, Andy Bennett and David Muggleton who proposed that such groupings are less informed by class location and practices of resistance than by consumer preferences and elitist attitudes which closely mirror mainstream norms and values. These post-subcultural ideas are illustrated with reference to various ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘taste cultures’, including tattoo enthusiasts, goths and virtual communities. The chapter also addresses some of the main issues and arguments to have emerged from post-subcultural studies including: the challenge to post-subcultural studies as little more than a neoliberal discourse that attempts to gloss over the still rampant issues of class inequality and racism in late capitalism; the lack of a cohesive theoretical basis or central school of thought among subcultural theorists; and the reliance on small-scale empirical studies.