Reading (and Shopping) with Angela McRobbie is a personal and critical essay by Rose Higham-Stainton (LARB, March 2026) reflecting on the work of Angela McRobbie, one of the key figures of the Birmingham School of cultural studies.

McRobbie studied under Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s. Where Hall had brought race into conversation with class, McRobbie added gender — focusing on the cultural lives of girls and young working-class women through objects academia had long ignored: teen magazines, secondhand clothes, bedroom culture, popular music.

Her landmark early study of Jackie (the British girls’ magazine, 1964–1993) showed how mass culture produces and polices femininity, packaging romance and domesticity as the natural horizon of girlhood. Her essays on the ragmarket and vintage fashion read shopping not as passive consumption but as feminised labour and, at times, a form of temporary freedom. Her work on popular music introduced the concept of the “phallic girl” — the post-feminist demand that female artists perform masculinity while remaining impeccably feminine.

Her latest book, Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies (2024), pairs seven original Birmingham essays (1975–1995) with four new auto-ethnographic pieces, showing how the same questions — visibility, representation, constraint — persist across decades and media.

Higham-Stainton’s essay is also a memoir: of Goldsmiths, of the mid-2000s, of growing up inside the very cultural formations McRobbie spent a career dissecting.