Call yourself a hipster or not, I am sure that you’ve partaken in some sort of fashion, beer, music, what-have-you. We’ve all done it. It’s hard not to when you see it everywhere. This is a good attempt at decoding some of this nonsense.
When we see hipsters everywhere we know them, and can pick our their type. There’s no need to pick them out of a crowd, for they are the crowd. I’ve had many conversations about who and where they’ve come from and what we can compare them to in our past. Because, let’s face it. That’s what we do. We look at something in our lives and take a look at history and try to explain it through something familiar to us. It’s how we function, usually.
At first you could say they are comparative to the hippie. But the hippie fought for something right? Peace…..free love….weed. They were fighting for something then, being constructive and demanding. It wasn’t something everyone else made fun of. It was envied and thought of as new. Then I thought, maybe they could be like the Beats- people who have an intellectualism going for themselves. Then I remembered that hipsters aren’t too intellectual and just wear a same brand of strange clothes like the beats did. Then this article (see above link) was presented to me, and it makes perfect sense.
“An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. 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.”
When you see another Christmas sweater, or go into Urban Outfitters thinking it’s going to be a good choice (when it’s not) or when you move to Brooklyn to take photos with your fish eye and go see Best Coast, think again. What’s really going on here?