You're a hipster, I'm a hipster, no one's a hipster

When Douglas Haddow’s cover story “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” came out in Adbusters in July 2008, the world, it seemed, was at the brink of imploding from all the collective navel-gazing about hipsterism — what it is, to whom it refers, and why it exists. “While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the ‘hipster’ – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society,” it argued. The article turned into such an edifying exercise in mousepad anthropology that it polarized readers and mopped up an impressive 4,167 comments.

Since then, the hipster — we’ll get to the original definition in a bit — has become the go-to whipping boy (and girl) of snarky bloggers everywhere. The h-word is now so disparaging that Gawker.com took advantage of the “thoroughly unwarranted level of interest” in finding a word to replace it and ran a poll. The winner? “Doucheosie,” a mutation of the word “douchebag” which the Oxford English Dictionary says was first used in the 1960’s to describe “an unattractive co-ed, or by extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate.”

Blame Kanye

But as it turns out, the preamble was in preparation for a greater hell: “The Age of the Hipster Mainstream,” as Robert Moor articulated in “On Douchebags,” his 2009 Wag’s Revue essay. “It occurred at roughly around 6 p.m. on September the 6th, 2008, when Kanye West hung up his preppy gear and chose instead to don a starched white dress shirt, top-button buttoned, a David Byrne-esque gray flannel suit and oversized sunglasses to perform songs off his newest album for the MTV Music Video Awards,” Moor wrote. “So goes Kanye, so goes the nation.”

No wonder more and more people I see on TV, on the street and online – especially Lookbook, ugh – resemble hipsters. Dudes in skinny denim cutoffs, girls in fake eyeglasses, everyone in alt-grunge or old-man outfits – it’s all become quite predictable. Even bitching about it — after a cursory glance at Paste Magazine’s vaguely scientific “Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009” timeline — seems routine now.

“Today’s scenesters all wear the same clothes and accessories, listen to the same sounds, ride the same bicycles, and read the same magazines, e-mailouts and style blogs,” observed The Independent’s Tim Walker in 2008. Is this the end of individuality or the start of global brand of cool?

Proto-Hipsters

As the mainstream increasingly assimilates, consumes and subverts the hipster aesthetic — the thick-rimmed specs, the faux-blue collar attire, the rolled-up skinny trousers, the eclectic musical tastes — the more we lose sight of what hipsters truly are. 2003’s A Field Guide to the Urban Hipster classifies them as “living off a parentally provided allowance, in order to meet the high demands dictated by their social lives.”

In short, the proto-hipsters were trustafarians, artsy, sceney New York kids who sponged off their rich parents while taking on the guise of the working man so as not to seem too contemptible. They slummed it by mashing up sartorial references from previous eras, shopping at thrift stores, sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, smoking Parliaments and dreaming of moving to non-capitals like Omaha, Nebraska to work in the marginally profitable rock-music scene. (Swaths of these American Apparel-clad slackers initially moved to nowhere Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope for the cheap rent, but inadvertently gentrified them and drove rents up.) Sadly, their desire to be perceived as lo-fi and earthy — the anti-bling versions of early It kids like Paris Hilton and Fabian Besabe — was deemed fake and condescending. Thus, hipster hatred was born.  

The Alt Equation

Radar magazine proclaimed the term “hipster” dead and meaningless as early as 2003, when a flood of style guides came in the wake of Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook. It’s somewhat funny that it still has some traction today.

What I see is this: what was once easy to peg as part of the hipster ethos is now not so. On the one hand of the alt equation, you have irony, Three Wolf shirts, electro, designer clothes, neon and Italo disco. On the other, you have beards, flannel, bowties, veganism and fixed gear bikes. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a new counterculture gives way to a new kind of mainstream. It’s this constant tug of war that produces much of the creative energy that drives trends, which in turn keep humanity from freezing in time.

Given my ahead-of-the-curve, trendslutty ways, I’ve been accused of being a hipster — more specifically, a meta-hipster — quite a few times. I have copped to not wanting everybody else to catch up with what I’m into, but isn’t that what youth is all about? See, if I’m a hipster, then you’re a hipster, too. And if we’re all hipsters, then no one is. Simple as that.  

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