“Do you know that he called me a hipster?
Hipster! Do hipsters walk around wearing $300 jeans from Italy?”
There was no more hated figure. of the post-millennium era
than the hipster.
“Ugh, hipsters.” (shooting sounds)
“Aren’t you getting a little tired of this?
I mean, the clothes, the antique yo-yos.”
Here’s how you spot a hipster, on and offscreen:
First off, they’ll never call themselves that,
and will vigorously deny being one.
“He’s like a hipster, right?”
“No! No, I’m not a hipster at all.”
“Yeah, yeah. You do seem to hate a lot of things.
And the bottom of your pants are awful tight.”
The hipster is defined by what they don’t like,
rather than what they do.
“But you hate movies that are universally loved.”
“I don’t even—”
“You like Forest Gump?”
“No! No, it’s a horrendous piece of s[BLEEP].”
They have a superiority complex based on disdaining anything mainstream
and preferring obscure treasures no one else has heard of.
“I really only listen to, like, German Death Reggae
and Halloween sound effects records from the 1950s.”
Ultimately, the hipster is defined less by an ideology
than by an aesthetic --
what HuffPost’s Julia Plevin terms the “carefully created sloppy vintage look.”
“Hipster or homeless pop quiz, ready?”
The hipster believes their superpower is
their ultra-discerning, highly specific taste.
“It pains me will live in a world where nobody’s heard of Spearmint.”
But they have to keep chasing new discoveries and discarding
old favorites as soon as they’re embraced by the masses.
“Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit off of Nevermind.”
“Oh no, Rob, that’s not obvious enough.
Not at all.”
Yet, while all this has led to hipsterdom being dismissed
as pretentious or fake, the authentic version of
this character is in search of something deeper --
a truly alternative existence.
And this can be a noble pursuit if they can overcome the addiction
to irony and put some heart into it.
“I can help people.”
VICE declared the death of the hipster in 2015,
but the figure’s aesthetic is more ubiquitous than ever.
So, did this persona actually die or has the hipster become
what it always hated: mainstream?
Here’s our take on where the hipsters came from
and where they’re at today.
[Music]
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[Music]
“2020 vision is just a pair of empty frames.
Dressing like a nerd, although I never got the grades.”
The modern “hipster” label emerged in the early 2000s
to describe someone who (according to Robert Lanham’s
2003 The Hipster Handbook)
“possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool
by the cool…” --
“I said I love The Smiths…
You have—you have
good taste in music.”
“You like The Smiths?”
“Yeah.”
-- and who “shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear
by the mainstream.”
“When you’re used to listening to the raw power of
Iggy and The Stooges, everything else just sounds,
kind of like… precious.”
A lot of the hipster’s cachet is tied up in the idea that
they’re an arbiter of taste.
“Because you’re just some wannabe hipster
who judges everything because you’re too scared to
take a chance on anything.”
They’re experts on high culture, and they love low culture,
but only with an ironic detachment.
[keytar playing Star-Spangled Banner]
Almost as soon as this type had a name, the hipster character took off
in film and TV both as an indie hero and a subject of satirical mockery.
“Sorry, I was taking a selfie while shooting a Snapchat,
while periscoping that Snapchat, while instagramming latte art.”
In the late aughts and early 10s, actors like Michael Cera and Zach Braff
played hipster heroes whose fashionably alternative tastes
seemed to connote superiority of the soul.
“Cuz you’re, like, the coolest person
I’ve ever met… and—and you don’t
even have to try, you know?”
“I try really hard, actually.”
Hip-to-the-max 500 Days of Summer
was a love story that denied being one --
“This is not a love story.”
-- starring a hipster who characteristically
refused the label.
“All you people calling me a hipster can go f[BLEEP] yourselves.”
But it showed how the hipster’s trademark differentness and detachment
could produce valuable insights;
the script used a playfully ironic third person narration
to critique its protagonist’s clichéd, unrealistic views of love.
“This belief stemmed from early exposure to
sad British pop music… and a total misreading
of the movie The Graduate.”
The actress who played unattainable love interest
Summer, Zooey Deschanel, embodied the female hipster
in almost all her roles of that era --
“I teach a jogging photo group for people who want to both
exercise and practice photography.”
-- but especially as Jess in New Girl.
“Ugh! C’mon bangs, you sons of bitches.”
Jessica Day epitomizes the adorkable girl,
who revives seemingly uncool hobbies like knitting, crafting, and baking,
and channels a vintage ultra-femininity
(which Deschanel also commercialized via her website HelloGiggles).
Alternative Hollywood A-listers likewise profited from the rise of the hipster,
as former indie darlings like Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr.
harnessed their hipster credentials into fronting major franchises.
“He’s got another buyer for the Jackson Pollock in the wings.
Do you want it, yes or no?”
“Is it a good representation of his Spring period?”
But at the same time as the hipster was being embraced,
they were being mocked.
“A guy like that’s hanging out here? This bar is over.”
When they weren’t being ridiculed, they were openly distained,
blamed for the gentrification of formerly working-class
neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg
or London’s Shoreditch.
“They’re trying to make the neighborhood spiffy for the
invading hipster hordes.”
Hipster culture was associated with fakeness and lazy posturing
by slackers who had no talent or work ethic.
“Working feels bad and I don’t ever wanna work one more day
in my entire life.”
At the center of the hipster hate is a portrait of the figure
as a hypocrite.
The Guardian’s Alex Rayner wrote, “detractors might not know exactly
what a hipster is, but they do know what they don’t like:..
a tiresome sort of trendy, ostentatious in their perceived rebellion,
yet strangely conformist.”
“So, guys, what should we do? Send them to heaven or make
‘em burn in hell?”
[Chanting] “Burn in hell!”
“Yeah! That’s what I thought!”
In 2009, Paste’s Kate Kiefer charted various phases of
the hipster’s evolution in subtypes, like “the scenester,” “the twee,”
“the mountain man,” and the “vintage queen,”
touching on the hipster’s contradictory aspects, like
a desire for “working class authenticity” and an attachment to their iPod.
The common denominator in all these examples is not
a fixed-gear bike or a can of PBR, but how the hipster shapeshifts
to stay ahead of trends.
“It might be the hair.”
“What might?”
“It changes a lot… the color. That’s why you might not
recognize me.”
This appropriation of a range of aesthetics
betrays the upper-middle class white privilege that’s central
to the hipster.
“Between you and me, like, my parents pay my cellphone bill
and everything else that I need.”
Drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bordieu, The New York Times’
Mark Greif argues that the hipster’s obsession with the idea of good taste
is just another way of reinforcing class structures, writing,
“Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit.”
“It’s important to remember that many of these cops are poor, uneducated,
and bad at their jobs.”
“I close my eyes and try to imagine growing up in a place like this,
living with a feeling that I’ll never be able to leave.”
[Music]
The “hipster” term was first coined In the 1940s by jazz musician
Harry Gibson as a way to describe himself and his fans.
[Singing] “They call him handsome Harry ‘The Hipster,’
He’s the boy with all the chicks.”
Beat Generation figures like writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac --
who were also avid jazz fans -- epitomized the post-war hipster
with their mission to live for the moment outside of
conventional society.
Old hipsters and new hipsters share a parallel in both thinking
of themselves as a part of a wider counter-culture.
But one thing that distinguishes the earlier hipster is that he was
shaped by the aftermath of World War II.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
Norman Mailer defines the hipster mindset as a kind of existentialism
brought about by witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb.
Faced with this specter of sudden death -- or of (quote)
“a slow death of conformity” -- the hipster rebels against
“square” society.
Over time, the “hipster” label came to broadly define young,
middle-class progressives who emulated working-class styles
and stuck two fingers up at mainstream culture.
1969 road movie Easy Rider depicted rebellious, hipster characters trying,
and failing, to forge a sustainable path outside of capitalist American society.
“It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.”
In Europe, French New Wave filmmakers also tried to embody
an alternative mindset by marrying existentialist philosophy, left-wing
politics, and stylish young actors like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.
[speaking French – English translation:]
“I told you, the worst flaw is cowardice.”
But while all these manifestations of hipness may heroically reject
mainstream culture, there’s a bleakness to the stories they tell.
“You know Billy, we blew it.”
“And then you go for the big money, man, and then you’re free… You dig?”
“We blew it.”
By the end of The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock may have taken a stand
against conforming to his parents’ will, but the victory is hollow,
as he and Elaine will probably end up turning into their parents anyway.
[Music] “Within the sound of silence.”
The millennial hipster of the aughts retains his predecessor’s pessimism,
and also channels the malaise and sarcasm of ‘90s Gen-X slackers
like Ethan Hawke’s Troy Dyer in Reality Bites --
“At the beep, please leave your name, number, and a brief justification
for the ontological necessity of modern man’s existential dilemma,
and, uh, we’ll get back to you.”
-- and sensitive, sullen emo-types like Daria.
“People judge you by your expression.”
“Yes. And I believe there’s something intrinsically wrong with that system.
I have dedicated myself to changing it.”
We can see the legacy of older hipster’s darkness and doomed search for purpose
in modern hipster Dory on Search Party.
The hollowness of her aimless existence leads her to seek meaning in the
disappearance of a girl she only superficially knew.
“I think you’ve decided that this matters to you because you
have nothing else.”
While her friends typify the status and self-obsessed notions of the
millennial hipster --
“I mean she was very… jealous of me.”
-- Dory, at first, exemplifies something deeper.
But (SPOILER ALERT) after she gets into trouble and might be
held accountable for her increasingly harmful actions --
“Could these two seemingly charming hipsters be
cold-blooded murderers?”
-- she leans into her privilege, counting on it to help her
literally get away with murder.
“I don’t need your permission to do anything.
And I don’t regret saying what I did
So you need to stop crying about it and do your job.”
Throughout the hipster’s history, there’s a theme of resisting
the capitalism that underlines mainstream society,
stamping out individualism, in the name of making everyone
good little consumers.
But one of the criticisms of the millennial hipster movement is that
it’s essentially capitalism in counter-culture clothing --
a commodification of alternative aesthetics.
Far from taking down the man, the privileged modern hipster
serves to uphold the existing hierarchies.
Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” argues that
the original hipster’s identity, too, was an appropriation of
black culture (and especially jazz culture).
2017’s Get Out makes this ongoing cultural appropriation
into horror with (SPOILER ALERT) the story about literally transplanting
white minds into black bodies, as white characters who want to be hip
try to steal a young, black artist’s perceived “coolness.”
“Black… is in fashion!”
The castigations of hipster culture always come down to the criticism
that they’re actually hypocritical conformists.
But what if a hipster is for real?
Isn’t it admirable to earnestly seek an alternative life
and not just mindlessly do what everyone else does?
“You just always seemed… Like, how do I put this?
In search of yourself?
Like looking for constant purpose.”
It’s more difficult to live differently, which makes it all the more worth it
to try.
“It’s like my photography. I know there isn’t that much
Demand for blurry photographs Taken while running but—"
“I wasn’t gonna say anything.”
[Laughs] “You know, who cares?
And it’s important to have people in society who care about art and culture
as much as the hipster does.
High Fidelity’s protagonist Rob may be a music snob --
“It’s the best collection I’ve ever seen.”
-- but Rob’s also an idealist with a deep love for music
as an art form.
“Making a playlist… is a delicate art… You get to use someone else’s poetry
to express how you feel.”
This combination of passion and exacting standards contributes to
the appreciation and preservation of great cultural creations.
The film director version of the hipster is arguably Wes Anderson,
whose been both revered and parodied for his devotion to his signature style.
“From the twisted mind of Wes Anderson,
it’s The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders.”
Because his aesthetic is so defined – from the Futura typeface to the
meticulous symmetrical framing – it’s easy to write off his films as
only style and no substance.
However, while some of his characters may appear pseudo-intellectual
Or pretentious --
“My top schools where I want to apply to are Oxford and the Sorbonne.
My safety’s Harvard.”
They are far deeper than that.
“I think we’re just gonna have to be secretly in love with each other
and leave it at that, Richie.”
Similarly, David O. Russell’s 2004 film I Heart Huckabees
might play to some as twee or contrived looking back,
but at its core it is a film about a young person
caring enough to examine the deep nature of existence --
“Everything is the same even if it’s different.”
-- while taking a stand against The rising tide of consumerism.
“I’m talking about not covering every square inch of populated America
with houses and strip malls until you can’t even remember what happens
when you stand in a meadow at dusk.”
We can sympathize with hipster characters who feel lost,
like life isn’t living up to their high standards.
Jess Mariano, Rory’s hipster love interest from Gilmore Girls,
is an outlier in Stars Hollow.
“Potlucks and Tupperware parties aren’t really my thing.”
“Too cool for school, huh?”
“Yes, that is me.”
But his interests aren’t all that different from Rory’s.
“You’ve read this before.”
“About 40 times.”
“I thought you said you didn’t read much.”
“Well, what is ‘much’?”
It’s just that Rory has a path laid out for her to follow,
and Jess doesn’t.
“I want to be good. Life’s just not letting me.”
The hipster character may hide behind their irony or judgmental taste
to paper over what they don’t like about their lives or themselves.
But their happiness often comes in finding the courage to overcome
their ironic detachment --
“I guess I just figured… why make something disposable, like a building,
when you can make something that lasts forever, like a greeting card?”
[Laughs]
-- to admit how much they do care about things,
to put themselves out there and risk failing,
and to pursue a life that really fulfills them --
“I quit the office.”
-- cool or not.
The hipster has journeyed from cultural outlier
to mainstream agitator to just mainstream.
Their aesthetic has now become fully commercialized,
with seemingly every restaurant and café
embracing reclaimed wood and exposed lightbulb fittings.
Hipster archetypes are a fixture of mainstream movie and TV worlds.
Hipsters have grown into stable adults and parents;
and the traits once associated with hipsters are now viewed as
synonymous with millennial culture at large.
“Everything I hate about young people: rich, beautiful, corrupt.
What are they calling them, millellials?”
So, who are the new hipsters?
Some hipsters onscreen today finally represent more diverse perspectives
and deeper experiences.
“Are you the girl who wrote Chronicles of a Fed Up Millennial?”
“Rolling with a literary star.”
The college students in Dear White People have a
recognizable hipster aesthetic, but these characters are also
politically aware and striving for a better America.
“Everyone said we were crying wolf, But this is our proof.”
“A bunch of white kids dressing up like us.
This is some real shit.”
Meanwhile, the trend cycle continues on:
Esquire crowned 2020 the year of the shipster,
who would look more at home on a windswept beach
than at a Williamsburg bar, while sea shanties have
gone viral over TikTok.
[Singing] “Someday the Weller Man comes
to bring us sugar and tea and rum.”
But rather than racing to keep up, the truly hip person today can
zero in on what it’s really all about: searching for an alternative
way of life, beyond taste, that lives up to your ideals.
“The world’s a playground. You know that when you’re a kid,
but somewhere along the way, everyone forgets is.”
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[Music]