What was hipster

The skinny jean was instant and utter inversion, attaining the opposite extreme from the boot-cut flared motorcycle jeans of the White Hipster. It proved the vitality of a hipster community. It meant that the group impulse would hold, no matter how vertiginous the changes. Through both phases of the contemporary hipster, and no matter where he identifies himself on the knowingness spectrum, there exists a common element essential to his identity, and that is his relationship to consumption.

The rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive. Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority. On the contrary, the neighborhood organization of hipsters—their tight-knit colonies of similar-looking, slouching people—represents not hostility to authority as among punks or hippies but a superior community of status where the game of knowing-in-advance can be played with maximum refinement.

The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction. This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term hipster is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on. The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc. It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives.

He does not earn them. It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent any traditional bohemia are hangers-on. Somewhere, at the center, will be a very small number of hardworking writers, artists, or politicos, from whom the hangers-on draw their feelings of authenticity. Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core. Among hipsters, the skills of hanging-on—trend-spotting, cool-hunting, plus handicraft skills—become the heroic practice.

The most active participants sell something—customized brand-name jeans, airbrushed skateboards, the most special whiskey, the most retro sunglasses—and the more passive just buy it. Of course, there are artists of hipster-related sensibility who remain artists. In the neighborhoods, though, there was a feeling throughout the last decade that the traditional arts were of little interest to hipsters because their consumer culture substituted a range of narcissistic handicrafts similar enough to sterilize the originals.

It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts. And hipsterism did not make an avant-garde; it made communities of early adopters. To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. True countercultures may wax and wane in numbers, but a level of youth hostility to the American official compromise has been continuous since World War II. Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities.

One glimpses behind them the bike messengers, straight-edge skaters, Lesbian Avengers, freegans, enviro-anarchists, and interracial hip-hoppers who live as they please, with a spiritual middle finger always raised. And hipster motifs and styles, when you dig into them, are often directly taken from these adjacent countercultures. I mean why does someone deny they are a hipster: doubt. A doubt that it's an authentic identity, and hence they must "ironically" doubt it, they must point to it as "ironic" authenticity.

But really how can someone have an identity and deny it at the same time, sounds a bit exhausting and schizophrenic. Sounds like it opens one to being vacuous as a way to cope. Or to accuse everyone else around you as not being in the know, not being authentic enough, but neither are you—at least according to the ethos. Hipster anti-authoritarianism bespeaks a ruse by which the middle class young can forgive themselves for abandoning the claims of counterculture—whether punk, anti-capitalist, anarchist, nerdy, or '60s—while retaining the coolness of subculture.

Request for essay from magazine to kill off the hipster once and all: "What started as an organic, cheeky, postmodern lifestyle is now a carbon copy of a copy—co-opted by Urban Outfitters and sold like fast food.

Your essay would wonder, when everything cool in an urban context automatically gets subsumed by now uncool hipsterism, how can anything be cool again? How can cool recover? These poor rich kids only value local culture when repackaged by other, cooler countries. The rise of the hipster is intrinsically liked to widespread internet use, and the dwindling time in which a fashion moves from an expression of individual style to something photographed, blogged, reported on, turned into a trend, marketed, and sold.

Artists, not hipsters are gentrification's shock troops. And in many cases, before the artists think to move in, the children of a neighborhood's original residents are the ones who first start tinkering with buying houses there and opening up things to a new market, a new income bracket, a new set of amenities.

By the time the hipster appears in a neighborhood, the gentrification process is well underway. If anything, the presence of cool independent coffee shops staffed by white waiters with tattoos they can easily cover for a job interview signifies that a neighborhood will soon reach its coolness peak.

People who are upwardly mobile from the lower-middle class, to an artistic bohemian class, but wind up essentially serving coffee and beers for the people who believe themselves to be downwardly mobile, from the upper middle class. In French, a bobo, the closest french word to hipster, is one who acts cool but has money, pretends to make art but buys shoes, pretends to be radical but hangs on to privilege.

Branche is an older and more general term, closer to the word trendy. Hipster can be used but may relate to branche or bobo. Do they mock them? Ape them? The connotation of hipsters looking like the homeless obviously comes from a class pretension of the unhip middle class who in jealousy of all the attention these young people are getting insult them on aspects of fashion and lack of wealth, taste, etc.

It's a consumer-eat-consumer world. Unread, vacuous, not far from the aesthetics of the dominant older middle class? It was the deregulation of culture. We really, a lot of us—this is the suburban thing—were missing out on culture, we've got every other commodity but it.

Subculture was deregulated by the internet. If you would enter some sort of subculture, say punk or rockabilly or twee or something like that in the 90s, there were all sorts of controls and bureaucratic red tape on whether or not you could get in, and once you were in there were limitations on what you could do, say, and be. After this whole mortgage crisis, are hipsters going to stop being an urban phenomena and be like squatting in suburbs?

I actually like this idea of hipster flight from the city, so suddenly everyone's going to be drinking PBR and wearing detachable belt buckles. Everyone will just go back to Milwaukee or wherever they're from. Are there artists who are setting up entire housing developments as squats? One: hipsterism as the mechanism of the assertion of distinction. Where everyone is trying to distinguish themselves from other people in increasingly trivial ways, thus taking their eye off of essential matters.

Two: hipsterdom as homogenizing force, creating a kind of overall "rebel" consumer culture, to which one can belong by saying "I'm opting out," when in fact you're opting in. Where does something stop being ironic and become nostalgic? The usual stigma of hipster culture is that it's completely nihilistic—that there's no value except pleasure, that there's no use, that hipsters don't believe in anything, they don't do anything. I've been around the world and seen a lot of places that are just hipster-proof.

A lot of people go to Portland because it's sort of like the opposite of New York. Portland is like, if you don't make it anywhere else, then you move to Portland. But I think that's why a lot of people are successful from a place like Portland; you can be a really big fish in a small pond and start succeeding and get traction.

Are outsider groups the only ones that make possible new forms of cultural capital? And thus are hipsters always necessary to the powers that be? Perhaps, in an endlessly repeating pattern of co-optation, hipsters serve as agents for the stakeholders in the established cultural hegemony, appropriating the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors' groups if not the inventors themselves, in the best-case scenario of the power and the glory, the unification and the mode of resistance.

Can you perform a significant act of rebellion on Facebook? How do we stop running that race, stop worrying about the degree to which we are "hip", the degree to which our treasured self-conceptions can be made into cliches against our will? One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity. The faint air of self-satisfaction inherent in the premise of a post-hipster conference grew thicker and thicker.

Some even seemed to confuse hipsterism with an artistic avant-garde when they are in fact opposites by definition. The hipster as the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics. I was a gentrifier in Williamsburg. Like the maligned hipsters, I used my parents' savings to secure a place to live.

I hoped for property values to rise, so that I could sell my apartment for a profit. Is there homophobia in the hipster-hating, a revulsion in seeing men who care "too much" about how they look? Hipsterism has some sort of repressed white-American sensibility in its essence. Something that arises form the luxury of sleeping through life.

A true hipster rapper would've been the epitome of an Uncle Tom, exploiting a robust, nourishing culture to create an empty white-friendly shell. In my view, the Blipster is a contemporary update on the cool black nerd, picking stuff up from white subculture to develop an accepted type. These skinny, nappy-facial-haired black dudes might even be avatars of our ethnocultural future. Hipsterism strikes me as what happens when white folks become aware of power and inequity—but then say, "Well, what are we supposed to do?

The girls always looked good, if a little dead in the eyes. Not everyone was a famous person, but everybody looked like one. Instead of doing art, people everywhere were "doing" products. A subculture of pro-consumer, pro-consumption, amoral, pro-lifestyle. Something in the "white hipster" imagination moved inexorably toward justifying rich whites in not having to be anything but white.

Hipsters rationalized white colonization and separation by unconsciously forming an ethnicity for themselves. It's all about superiority: you may be tending bar, but if you are tending bar in hip clothes and you're in a band at night, you'll always possess higher status in culture if not in income than the bond-trader losers ordering vodka tonics in button-downs.

Nov 28, Gladia rated it liked it. In late August I crossed the ocean and the presence of the hipsters became a reality. The first time I dared to wear converse, skinny jeans and a flannel shirt I got looks that left no doubts. If people associated me so easily to hipsters, I might as well find what a hipster actually is. The first thing that surprised me was the gravity of the tone. The fact that the complete title is What Was The Hipster? A Sociological Investigation might have given me a clue that of sociological investigation they are actually talking about.

Anyway, I though some humor was going to be employed. I was wrong. The preface by Mark Greif was probably the part that mostly made me nostalgic of some healthy self-irony. And this in literally the first eleven pages. The preface is followed by the transcript of a Symposium that took place at the New School where three people expressed their theories on the hipsters and then there was a discussion.

Here I should say: thank you Christian Lorentzen. The one that actually seemed to take the whole issue more lightly. Not strictly related to the sociological issue at stake but funny nonetheless: 'I am now of the opinion that procreation should be prohibited before the age of 30, except among the rich and in Alaska.

He wrote plenty about the hipsters before in his defense, he does mention the fact in his statement. The rest of the book is composed by a Dossier with articles about the discussion, followed by a selection of Essays.

Are they really so relevant from a cultural or sociological point of view? It seems to be an immutable truth that each new generation finds their elders to be unbearably stodgy, and each older generation finds their successors to be unreasonably self-absorbed. Perhaps the connotations of hipster are just a convenient way of expressing this.

Feedback We've Added New Words! Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. I fail to see how this is any less insulting than just leaving women out of the conversation altogether. She name-checks the collaboration between conceptual artist Jenny Holzer and the sneaker line Keds announced in June , but fails, oddly, to note that while Polaroid film was discontinued in , it was back in production again by March , thanks to a private company formed by ex-Polaroid employees.

The reissued film retails for approximately twice the cost of the original. Once again, the most interesting analysis of the hipster surfaces from the simplest calculations. For all its failings, the volume gives a recorded history to a decade that has largely been chronicled—until any given site goes dark—online.

I was asked by a friend while reading the book if Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes had always been "kind of crazy rightwing.

McInnes, incidentally, was a panelist on the L. The true gem of the book is the final essay, Christopher Glazek's look at conflict between Hasidism and hipsters in South Williamsburg over a bike lane. As usual, hipsters come off as entitled brats, but then, so do the anti-bike-lane Hasidic Jews, who complain about what is ultimately an improvement to transportation safety. The volume raises plenty of questions I wish it had answered.