A pithy introduction to hipsters.
The concept of “hipster” can be hard to nail down; the subculture, as one MetaFilter commenter notes, is based on rejecting one’s being part of it: “It’s usually a safe bet that no one actually refers to themselves as a hipster. A hipster is only something someone else is.” Yet there are some attributes that nearly everybody can affix to the label. A 2008 Adbusters article on the subcultural phenomenon notes that “the American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols […] that have been appropriated by hipsterdom.” Later it adds “skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh” to the list. The highest-ranking definition from Urban Dictionary mentions ubiquitious hipster accessories as, variously, tattoos, dyed hair, the publications Black Book, Nylon, and the Styles section of the New York Times. In New York, they live in Williamsburg (except, they probably don’t anymore. So x minutes ago). Ask any young urban dweller to point out the hipsters in a room and they’ll be able to do it. But they likely won’t include themselves. (SOURCE: I am a young person.)
Even given these labels placing the hipsters into any recognizable pattern of taste is a hard one. Though their bread and butter is classic lowbrow, the dredges of working-class nostalgia (flannel, cheap beer, and V-neck t-shirts) would not have screamed “hip” in any other era. But their taste in media fragments could be read as highbrow - a constantly evolving appreciation for cutting-edge, experimental, avant-garde rock and electronic music from different corners of the globe (Sweden! Canada! Sri Lanka!) and, often, a rather intellectual appreciation for foreign and independent film, canonical literature, and modern art. Perhaps they are the advancing guard of John Seabrook’s notion of Nobrow, where any media fragment takes equal status as a “cultural consumable”, and traditional class-based taste structures break down in the face of modern consumer culture. But in this framework, even that doesn’t quite say enough.
So the hipster lifestyle is predicated upon resisting trends, creating new ones from old ones, going against the mass grain, and essentially being deliberately different. The problem, of course, is that it seems everything can be commodified and nothing can be resisted (just ask those Frankfurt Marxists, Adorno and Horkheimer). So hipsters constantly change their focus, fixing their gazes for a fleeting moment on a new obsession. They try to escape becoming an object of advertising by changing their trends at the speed of the internet, and taking pleasure in watching marketers just try to keep up. But the tastemakers at American Apparel, or how designers come and go at Urban Outfitters (Are those still the shops of choice? It’s hard to tell.) seem to have it down. They are, against all odds, a place where hipsters become consumers. Controversial music reviewer Pitchfork Media sells the “hipster music aesthetic” back to them (NOTE: “them” not “us”), essentially creating the trendy taste in music. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Converse shoes have a stranglehold on the group, out of no noticeable work of their own. Hipsters are, like all Americans (don’t know if “hipsters” exist elsewhere, at least by that name) buyers of things, in spite of their dislike of that consumer culture.
The Adbusters article violently and melodramatically decries hipsterdom as “the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.” While this description definitely overstates the importance of a somewhat confined subculture, and comes off as aggressively traditional, it points to the crux of the “what is a hipster” question. If they are the end of Western civilization, then they are the first fully postmodern subculture that is aware of the fact. They reappropriate everything, seamlessly blending styles from various eras and classes of fashion, kill traditional descriptors of music to create new overly-hyphenated-genre-defiers, They make idols out of “unoriginalists” like Girl Talk and Poster Boy, which in turn become mass phenomena. Their persons are pastiche and parody, soaked through with ironic glances at themselves and others. The hipsters are, themselves, intertextual, referencing texts so specific you’d have to be reading nonstop to catch them all. They value form over function, and basically anything else. What they care about is precisely being hip, not what is hip. Their style is style itself. They are defined by their taste. And though they may not want to admit it to you, they are endlessly, obsessively self-aware.
Thus, Hipster Runoff.
