And they are just as easily spotted by their behaviour, regardless of the habitat, which includes an enormous interest in food, particularly bread baking. The Hipster might be a global phenomenon, but there is a small country on the northern perimeter of Europe where hipster culture has had a particular impact. This country is Sweden. Urbanisation occurs at high speed here — two busloads a day follow the lure of the capital and move to Stockholm. The lure seems to be the cosmopolitan fast lane, the constant flow of impressions.
An over crowded subway beats out the quiet ripple of a forest stream every time. We Swedes grow up with American TV and music. We follow trendy globalists on Instagram and Pinterest. Consequently, Swedish hipsters know which bar tops the trend lists in Brooklyn within days of its opening. A few years ago, the management at Brooklyn Brewery were amazed to note that their biggest following outside the US was in a tiny country of nine million souls: Yes, Sweden.
Swedish hipster culture is, undoubtedly, driven by a certain anxiety. Next week the very same individuals are furniture makers or hydroponic chili farmers. Checkered shirt — check. Timberland boots — check. The right Kindness-remix in the headphones — check. Full beard — check. Fixed-gear bike — check… We do not rest until the hipster style looks, and is in fact, complete. One good thing with this is the energy it injects in to Swedish towns and cities.
Young people living their dreams fill these places with fantastic hamburger joints, awesome micro breweries, cool flower shops, vintage flea markets and falafel joints. And all of this is achieving what exactly? Filling an inner void? Boosting self-esteem? Compensating for a rootless loss of ideals? Modern Swedish hipsters nourish the delusion that their ancestry trails back to the concrete jungles of Williamsburg.
As superficial as fashion trends may be, when it comes to trying to look good and judging others accordingly , not even critics can resist their sovereignty. The subsequent handwringing over what implicated the community of handwringers mirrored the anguish over gentrification expressed by a community of gentrifiers. Gentrification proceeded by disowning the principle while continuing the practice. So hipsters endured by denigrating the attitude while cultivating the fashion.
When with hipster or gentrifier does the pejorative first make sense? A gentrifier does not become a gentrifier until migration to a neighborhood reaches a critical mass. Since it is the latecomers who effectively turn the early migrants into gentrifiers, one can understand why the first wave resents subsequent arrivals, no matter what they mean for property values. Priority becomes the basis of a new pecking order.
Those who had felt the sting of being uninitiated now turned the tables in college, where—fashion apostles—they brought the good stylistic news. Waves of subsequent adoption continued in this manner for several years, with ever finer distinctions, an increasing narcissism of petty differences, and more anxious and uncertain airs of superiority, until at last everyone was partly hipster and everyone partly hated hipsters now seen as the earlier adopters who looked down their noses at you.
By the time any respectable hipster felt obliged to decry hipsterism just as any respectable gentrifier felt obliged to decry gentrification , taking stylistic steps away from hipster fashion made as strong a stylistic statement as taking steps toward it had made a decade before. Thus, by the mid-aughties, the core hipster conundrum was in place. Not only could we never say precisely what a hipster was; more confusing still, everyone involved in the discussion possessed some percentage of hipster DNA, and everyone, according to his purity or impurity, felt entitled to judge everyone else as either overly or insufficiently hipster.
In this way hipster started to look like a metadiscourse on the very etiquette of hip: How much was too much?
When were distinctions valid and when vulgar? Like any fashion, hipster operated on a subconscious level too, and—when it came to dating, say—even those who had no problem excoriating the hipster as superficially judgmental could hardly help evaluating the coolness or attractiveness of potential partners through a lens fashioned in the hipster imagination. Of course, to be fair, the scope and meaning of a cultural moment are impossible to see in the midst of it, and even the sense of retrospective clarity may be nothing more than conversancy with retrospective myths.
But was this the renaissance or the death of hipster? If the term indicates a spontaneous style or subculture, exclusive and not yet wholly commodified, then the crucial window of —04 marks less a pivot than a dissipation—the moment when urban migrants to a neighborhood reach a critical mass, the inexorable forces of gentrification set in, and craft-beer bars and farm-to-table restaurants suddenly litter the main drag. Hipster went mainstream in , just as the radical shift in style took place.
Two data points help fix the moment precisely. The clothing company Urban Outfitters, founded under the name Free People in Philadelphia in and incorporated in , went public in None of this tracks with broader trends in the market or major indexes.
They wanted the ready-made version, and it was hard to blame them. Being a protohipster snob in , before the advent of any support industry, seemed like a full-time job. On the other hand, the emergence of this industry marked the end of hipster as a subculture. It shed the baggage of any ethos and proceeded to become a fashion, pure and simple.
The fashion now evolved too. A lacing of queer and Eurotrash fashion appeared. Occupy Wall Street was another face of this development. Such resurgences of natural and communitarian values have recurred periodically since at least the Romantic era, as one response to industrial and urban alienation. But this idea—that capitalistic self-seeking despoils the ecological foundations of life, social and organic—flourished in the late aughties alongside, not as a result of, hipsterism.
The original hipster had been apolitical. After , with mounting concern about Bush administration overreach, political indifference fell out of fashion. Where early hipsters had made virtues of taciturnity and unpleasantness, the new hipsters were almost painfully nice. We live in the aftermath of this swerve. Late hipster is so many things that it has practically no meaning.
In literature, visual art, and film, what could possibly supplant a postmodern ethos that permits and incorporates everything that precedes or postdates it? Most remember a time when trips to the record store involved browsing well-defined and rigorously segregated music genres.
No one, to the best of my memory, was caught dead liking pop. But this threat of co-optation turned out, paradoxically, to be what gave subculture its vitality and established a meaningful target for its subversive energy. We may end up missing our grumpy weirdoes more than we realize. Belonging everywhere starts to feel, at some point, like belonging nowhere.
In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , Bourdieu made the case that those aesthetic distinctions by which we demonstrate our refinement and sort ourselves socially are, far from natural or immanent, outgrowths of education and social background.
Richard Nice London, England: Routledge, First published His survey did not ask participants to propose a beautiful subject for a photograph, but only to choose from a list—one whose options seemed to exert a natural pressure toward the distinction he hoped to find. The relative weight given to compunction versus insipidity—what the question appears most truly to draw out—may reflect the tendency Bourdieu noted in different groups to associate the quality of a photograph more or less closely with the character of what it depicts: that is, to distinguish or not distinguish between the representation and the thing represented.
Around the time Bourdieu was conducting research for his book, Andy Warhol exhibited his Death and Disaster series —63 , whose most enduring work— Silver Car Crash Double Disaster , a serigraph taken from a photo of a gruesome automobile accident—remains the most expensive Warhol sold at auction to date.
It is worth asking yourself, for instance, what survey results would indicate a healthy distribution of opinion as opposed to a classist herd mentality.
Within the most highly educated group, And this does not even get into the deeper causal uncertainty: that taste may not be a product of self-sorting but a reason to self-sort. Such broad correlational trends may indicate less than they appear to at first.
In short, even if the mythos Bourdieu deconstructed had been true—that taste derives from an inherent superiority of judgment—it is not clear that his experiments would have produced different results. Yet who would dismiss these individuals for coming to their beliefs secondhand or for seeming only to represent the consensus of their milieu?
You have to start from the premise that aesthetic judgments are meaningless—and that education and class are likewise meaningless—to conclude that correlations between these quantities have no deeper logic than the mechanics of social power. This may be true, but to proceed from this premise is, more or less axiomatically, to discover what you set out to find. From this we might conclude that even if the commodification of a style is mercenary and cynical, it does not follow that the commodified style is meaningless or worthless itself.
Likewise, even if those who appropriate a style get few points for creativity, they may still get some , since all style, like all belief, is on some level appropriative. Perhaps neither Bourdieu nor Greif takes style seriously enough on its own terms. Every fashion that gains purchase must satisfy or resonate with an aesthetic need, some organic transpiration in human sensibility, and every vector of this new fashion—from the hippest to the lamest—is some part late-adopter and some part innovator.
There is a phenomenology of style, of what fundamentally strikes us as hip or cool, I would argue, that we have never fully penetrated or described. To lay it strictly at the feet of marketers and advertisers, to reduce it all to class mechanics and social self-sorting, is to avoid the central, most interesting question: What is the true meaning of aesthetics in our lives and our hearts, whence the germ force of style prior to commodification?
For if we value at all the great sweep of aesthetic diversity around us, we owe the trailblazers and vanguards of style something, whether they look down on us or not.
Whether we have hipsters to thank, the dominant urban style—especially in the built environment—has grown more sophisticated and refined over the last twenty years. Only critics guilty of the same retrospective nostalgia for which they fault hipsters could deny this. As this aesthetic grows stale and familiar itself, we will need new insurgent styles to upend the merely comfortable and derivative.
This is only as it should be. Hipsters caught hell for supposedly never developing a style of their own and instead parasitically drawing on older styles and more authentic subcultures. But is it ever so different? The spontaneous emergence of a name that the culture needed and understood—even a repurposed name tinged with judgment—offers sufficient evidence in itself that a new style had emerged.
The ironic honesty of this stance turned it into something halfway serious; by insisting on the vacuity of fashion, it transcended vacuity. It brought dialectical grit to the culture, as perversity always does. What drove people nuts about this original hipster was never vapidity in itself, but the sacrifice of everything—even the pleasures of human warmth—to the imperative of cool. The great monocultural wash of pop consensus has not only devitalized subculture but failed to grapple with the harm of feel-good acceptance when it tips into an ethic that refuses necessary distinction and meaningful judgment.
A culture that insists on consensus stalls like a locked-up engine. Hipsters got grief for being a subculture without political conviction or heft.
But even rigidly superficial movements matter because they destabilize our convictions and remind us of the many possibilities of being. They open up space, dimensionality, in existence. The grand consensuses of modern life online—the politics of approbatory or condemnatory agreement—keep culture from renewing and reinventing itself.
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