Since the early-2000s, the hipster has been a figure of hate around the world—an accusation as much as a subcultural identity that infers cultural elitism, poseurs, scenesters, or anyone who seems oblivious to their own pretentiousness. But the hipster is a notoriously slippery phenomenon. People rarely identify themselves as hipsters, and the term itself is forever out of vogue. Books such as A Field Guide to the Urban Hipster (Josh Aiello, 2003) and The Hipster Handbook (Robert Lanham, 2003) addressed the hipster as a historical phenomenon in 2003, while Mark Greif, writing for the New York Times, claimed in 2010 that the hipster’s ‘evolution lasted from 1999 to 2009’.1 More recently, Vice magazine—which was central to hipster branding in the early 2000s—published a series of articles on the death of the hipster, proposing 2015 as the year when ‘the idea of the hipster has ceased to be’.2 The hipster might always be dead, but all around me I see hipsters.
It is true that over the last five years this pejorative word for subcultural posing seems on the surface to be unhelpfully broad. More specific terms, such as ‘twee’, ‘health goth’, ‘normcore’, ‘lumbersexual’, or ‘yuccies’ (Young Urban Creative yuppies) have been adopted in favour of the now generic ‘hipster’. However, I think it would be a mistake not to consider the reasons why hipsters became such a dominant marker of twenty-first-century life in the first place. Whether a hipster by another name, we should confront what it means to hate someone’s aesthetic stance so much. It would also be too convenient for the art world not to pay attention to this maligned connoisseurial figure, especially given... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Tony Webster, Hipster Pointer, 2014. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. © Tony Webster.
