Hipsters: the Failed Subculture Movement of Our Generation
Deepra Yusuf, Class of 2013
Ware College House
April 7, 2012
Dee Yusuf came to Franklin and Marshall in the Fall of 2009 after having lived in several cities
around the world; today, she considers herself a New Yorker from Queens. Dee majored in
economics and developed a particular affinity for applying economic analysis to social issues.
After graduation she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve System and later at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hipsters: The Failed Subculture
Counterculture: a subculture whose values and norms of behavior deviate from those of
mainstream society, often in opposition to mainstream cultural mores (Wikipedia).
Countercultures are integral to society, as they are social movements that hold a mirror
up to mainstream life and force us to reevaluate what we believe to be reality. Countercultures
are places where the seeds of alternative lifestyles, epistemologies, and revolutions grow. So
when the rest of us are finally fed up with the way things have turned out we can look to these
movements for guidance. They are at times subaltern and at times in front of a loud speaker, but
no matter the case there is always a message, a critical lens cast on society, and sometimes
compelling directions toward an alternate path to personal fulfillment. Counterculture
movements in America have taken many forms; in the’60s it was the hippies, in the’80s punk
rock, in the’90s grunge and hip-hop. And today? What is our generation’s countercultural
movement? The digital age has made us aware of everything and nothing. And the only original
cultural phenomenon we have produced can almost be described as an anti-phenomenon. Many
of you may already know what I am referring to: the hipster.
Who is the Hipster?
If you ask someone what a hipster is, they will probably tick of a list of characteristics
and actions. When I asked my friends, I got these responses: “people who sit in coffee shops
always reading the first three pages of Moby Dick”; “someone who wears a flannel jacket, velvet
pants, and a bowtie….at the same time”; “people with handle-bar mustaches”; “anyone who
owns a typewriter”. Notice how no one I asked ever said, “me”. Although my own survey was
small, many journalists have repeated this test with the same result’. ‘Hipster’ is not a selfimposed identity. The hipster is always ‘the other.’ In fact it is mostly used as a term of derision.
Interestingly, most of the time it seems that the insult is coming from someone who looks oddly
similar to the people they are insulting. An Onion headline captures this concept best: “Two
Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other ‘Hipster’.”
When New York Times writer Mark Grief proposed a public debate on hipsterism, he
received e-mail messages from people around the country, some disdainful and some truly upset,
protesting such a discussion. People who were normally inquisitive protested that there could be
no answer and no definition (Grief). Why shroud the term hipster in ambiguity? True there is no
one definition of a hipster. Yet that is not reason not to discuss the term. As Grief himself put it,
“The longer we go without an attempt to explain the term simply and clearly, the longer we are
at the mercy of its underlying magic […] If we see the hipsters plain, maybe we’ll also see where
they might come undone” (Grief).
To know the hipster is to know how he came to be, emerging in the late ’90s from indie
and alternative youth culture, which gave itself meaning by juxtaposing itself against
consumerism. However this defining characteristic changed as hipsterism evolved (Grief, 2). In
his ethnography, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, sociologist
Richard Lloyd studied a group of people in Wicker Park, Chicago he termed “neo-bohemians.”
The word “Bohemian” refers to a type of person living in the early 20th century who chose live a
life with few formal social roles: enjoying music, literature, and art along with people of similar
tastes and being somewhat carefree, especially for the time, with their love life. Although the
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Hipsters: The Failed Subculture
neo-bohemians of Wicker Park seemed at first to resemble their earlier counterparts, Loyd
believes they eventually turned into something quite different. This creative group, who worked
day jobs in bars and coffee shops, came into collision with a new class of rich young people who
had begun moving into neo-bohemian neighborhoods in the early 2000s (Lloyd). As explained
by Grief, “the neo-bohemians […] encountered the flannel-clad proto-businessmen and dot-com
paper millionaires,” and something unexpected came out of this collision (Grief, 2). Artists,
writers, and filmmakers, people who can be thought of as embodying an authentic ‘hipness’
recognized and used their hipness as a status marker among themselves. But what they did not
anticipate was that they would become cultural fuel for the marketing of the concept of ‘cool’.
By commodifying the hip lifestyle, businesses have been able to sell what Greif calls “rebel
coolness.” Moreover, even those who were ‘authentically hip’ could not fully resist the
corporatization of their lifestyle, for at the end of the day they have to pay their bills in their
capacity as workers, “conforming to capitalism’s profit-making imperative” (Perry). Thus
hipsters are now defined by the tension they face between the inevitability of their role as a
consumer and their desire to transcend it. The hipster aligns himself both with rebel subculture
and with the dominant class, opening up a “poisonous conduit” between the two (Grief, 2).
Indeed the term hipster is itself woven out of controversy, having been originally used to
describe a different type of person before it was adapted to the identification of those who largely
embody the term today. The original hipster was a black subcultural figure of the late forties, a
term used to refer to aficionados of jazz or bebop in particular. This hipster adopted the lifestyle
of jazz musicians, their dress, slang, marijuana use, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, selfimposed poverty and relaxed sexual codes. Today the hipster has evolved into a white
subcultural figure. This hipster is defined by the desire of a white avant-garde subculture to
disaffiliate itself from ‘whiteness’, to absolve itself of the stain of economic and political
privilege, imperialist history, and corporate power. Moreover hipsterism, both black and white, is
about the possession of a special knowledge (Grief, 2). Anatole Broyard, a New York Times
writer in the 1940s, described the black hipster as having adopted his lifestyle because he
believed his other life was controlled by “conspiracies of power.” Broyard wrote of the black
hipster, “One of the basic ingredients [of hipster language is] a priorism […] it was a great
protection, a primary self-preserving postulate. It meant ‘it is given to us to understand.’ The
indefinable authority it provided was like a powerful primordial or instinctual orientation in a
threatening chaos of complex interrelations.” Today’s white hipster seeks to adopt this sense of
self-imposed rightness without reason, positioning himself as the victim of corporate America.
Paradoxically, though, he has reframed the concept of “original knowledge” to be about
consumption, being the possessor of exclusive things before anyone else (Grief, 2).
Moreover these “exclusive things” the new hipster seeks to possess represent nostalgia
for identities he is not and times he never experienced. The young, white, upper-class hipster
seems to love emblems of middle class existence: the trucker’s hat, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a
white t-shirt or faded flannel. Hipsters often appear to have put their outfits together in a rush
when in fact each piece really took hours to find at some underground vintage store and cost
significantly more than it looks to be worth. They look middle class, but they shop with an air of
upper class exclusivity and wealth. Moreover their belief that they are in solidarity with the
working class is even more preposterous, considering that many have never even spoken to
someone who actually works in a factory; in fact upper-class hipsters may have even made the
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Hipsters: The Failed Subculture
lives of actual working class people more difficult by gentrifying their neighborhoods, pushing
them out to find more affordable housing somewhere else. Thus, just as the hipster has tried to
‘de-white’ himself he has also tried to ‘de-class’ himself, but no one is reaslly fooled (Haddow).
The hipster, then, is someone who has adopted an identity that is not based on his own
life. He has inflated the value of his knowledge, and he plays status games not based on the depth
of his knowledge, but by a tokenistic knowing of things he himself claims to be cool. In the end
he is all style and no substance.
Why Should We Care About the Hipster?
I brought up counter culture movements at the beginning of my paper for a reason,
because we need one. The America of opportunity we learned about in grade school is now the
America where many of us may grow up to be worse off than our parents. Our generation has a
huge burden to bear, the growing inequality bequeathed to us by our parents’ generation.
Inequality is a multi-faceted problem, rooted in our neighborhood boundaries and educational
systems. Its effects are felt throughout a lifetime. What is our political voice against those of
wealthy corporate lobbyists? What power do locals have from being pushed out of the
neighborhoods their families have lived in for generations? How much does the average
American make a month compared to what a CEO makes in an hour? We have not even been
able to make inequality a purely economic problem. Racial minorities and women still face
inequalities in their access to jobs and, even when controlling for educational differences. All
this occurs whilst mainstream consumer culture glorifies the rich and places value on status
markers of wealth, reinforcing capitalist institutional structures while shrouding everyone in a
veil of opulence, such that we all hope one day to be up there amongst the ruling class.
So I ask, where is our movement? Counter cultural movements have been a part of this
country’s history since its inception. Each successive decade of the post-war era has witnessed a
counter-culture movement that has energetically challenged the social standards of the status quo
and fought to revolutionize music, art, government and civil society. The hipster has simply
consumed these previous revolutions. Walk down the street in a ‘hip’ neighborhood and you’ll
see a dozen young twenty-somethings sporting a checkered scarf around their neck. The
keffiyeh was originally worn by Jewish students and other protesters to express support for the
Palestinian cause in the 1960s. Today many hipsters wear the scarf without a clue as to its
significance (Haddow). In his article, “Hipster: the Dead End of Western Civilization,” Douglas
Haddow sums it all up: “After punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social
change, all of the formerly dominant streams of ‘counter-culture’ have merged together. Now,
one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define […]
the ‘Hipster’ ” (Haddow).
The hipster is a response to the vastness of our problems. The Internet has created a
situation in which we are saturated with information to the point that we don’t know what to do
with it all. We are made aware of the multiple dimensions of every problem we may have wanted
to change, and its interconnectedness with other problems, so much so that what we begin to feel
helplessness. It is not surprising that the hipster’s nostalgia for the past and use of irony to avoid
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Hipsters: The Failed Subculture
a genuine opinion has arisen (Wampole). The hipster who appropriates different styles from
different eras, and has shed--or rather thinks he has shed--his class and race identities embodies a
culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Where
previous youth movements challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, the hipster
mirrors the shallowness of our consumer society. The lack of an individual style or message
allows hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements and sub-cultures as a
way to seem rebellious (Haddow).
You would think that with nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of
"hipsterdom" would be left open to dissolution. But it is rather the lack of a message combined
with the embracing of irony--taking nothing seriously, saying little earnestly--that has appealed
to so many (Perry). Being ironic frees you from having to defend yourself. In fact, attacking the
hipster is redundant. Christy Wampole, author of the New York Times piece, “How to Live
Without Irony,” observes that “scoffing at the hipster is only a diluted form of his own
affliction.” Ironic living allows the hipster to dodge accountability for his choices and live
beyond his responsibility to enact social change where he sees injustice. As Warmpole puts it,
“To live ironically is to hide in public.”
The hipster is not only hiding from his responsibility to society but also from himself.
Although I have up to now described the hipster as an upper class phenomenon, people from the
middle and lower-middle classes have more recently adopted hipsterism as well. For them,
becoming a hipster is a way to gain social status in a way that they may never have the
opportunity to do so through their work. As Grief puts it, “hipster knowledge compensates for
economic immobility.” The upper-class hipster also hides from himself; he tries to detach
himself from his class through middle class clothes and cloaks the privilege he was born into by
looking like someone from a different decade (Grief).
Both types of hipsters believe they embody rebellion by wearing clothes from eras
marked by actual revolutions. They purport to be critics of inequality by artificially clothing
themselves in working class garb. But really their choices have made them immobile. They
embody style without substance. The only thing they can really claim to be is a consumer.
Ironically, the countercultural movement of our generation is fundamentally mainstream.
Are There Really Hipsters?
I said at the beginning of this paper that ‘hipster’ is not a self-imposed identity. The term
is more often than not used as a pejorative. Moreover, the person who looks like a hipster is often
the one scoffing about how the person down the street is a hipster. I have told you what clothing
typifies the hipster, which would allow you to easily identify a dozen hipsters while walking
down a block in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. But simply wearing vintage clothing can’t be the be
all and end all; even I sometimes enjoy wearing penny loafers. The fundamental criticism of the
hipster lies in the idea that he does not have ant real substance, they he is about looking cool and
talking cool, without really taking time to understand the nature of his ‘rebellion’. But how do
you determine whether a person has really thought critically about something? I believe I have
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met and talked with hipsters at parties, but to be fair, you cannot really know someone’s true
nature after spending a single night with them.
Perhaps the journalists whom I have cited in this paper have a better idea. Douglas
Haddow, who spent weeks at “hipster haunts” across New York City, certainly believes the
hipster exists. Instead of questioning whether hipsters really exist, he simply deems them selfloathing, observing that, “It's an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence
while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaim it” (Haddow). Perhaps this is simply
another way the hipster seeks to escape criticism.
Still, I am making a judgment call about someone who seems to be what I believe them to
be. Many journalists have used the term hipster to describe the young protestors in the Occupy
Wall Street movement. If that’s the case, I may be completely wrong about the hipster’s lack of
substance. One thing is for certain, though: for all the things the hipster may or may not be, he
certainly isn’t dead.
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Hipsters: The Failed Subculture
References
Broyard, Anatole. "A Portrait of the Hipster." The Partisan Review (1948): Karakorak. 5 Nov.
2010. Web. 19 Apr. 2013. <http://karakorak.blogspot.com/2010/11/portrait-of-hipster-byanatole-broyard.html>.
Grief, Mark. "The Hipster in the Mirror." New York Times. N.p., 12 Nov. 2010. Web. 19 Apr.
2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greift.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.
Grief, Mark. "What Was the Hipster?" The New Yorker. N.p., 24 Oct. 2010. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.
<http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/>.
"Hipster." Wikipedia. N.p., 9 Apr. 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subculture)>.
Haddow, Douglas. "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization." Adbusters. N.p., 29 July
2008. Web. 19 Apr. 2013. <http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html>.
Lloyd, Richard. "Richard Lloyd Discusses His Book NeoBohemia: Art and Commerce in the
Post Industrial City." Lecture. City Vision. Nashville Civic Center, Nashville. 30 Mar.
2013. Nashville Civic Design Center. 2008.
<http://www.civicdesigncenter.org/media/cv_episode_guide/2009/04/30/episode-06richard-lloyd-discusses-his-book-neobohemia-art-and-commerce-in-the-post-industrialcity.10015>.
Perry, Forrest. "Why Hipsters Aren't All That Hip." The Monthly Review 58.4 (2006): Web. 19
Apr. 2013. <http://monthlyreview.org/2006/09/01/why-hipsters-arent-all-that-hip>.
"Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other 'Hipster'" The Onion. N.p., 26 Mar. 2006. Web. 19 Apr.
2013. <http://www.theonion.com/articles/two-hipsters-angrily-call-each-otherhipster,5230/>.
Wampole, Christy. "How to Live Without Irony." New York Times. N.p., 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 19
Apr. 2013. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-withoutirony/>.
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