I've noticed hipsters seem to be accorded slightly less respect than zombies around here. Having been to Portland once, I kind of get it. That said, a hipster field guide would be helpful. And so, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy: Focus: You May Be A Hipster . . . Alternate Focus: Is Anti-hipster the new Hipster? Or, is Anti-hipster just good old reverse snobbery?
I'm not actually quite sure what a hipster is. At times, I think 'oh, look, there's one' and someone will say no, they're not a hipster. But wait, they have tattoos, poorly grown facial hair, and are wearing a faux 70's superhero t-shirt. I'm confused. Educate me, people.
You may be a hipster if you dress like a 1920s lumberjack and you live in a city, especially Brooklyn. Actually, you are a hipster if you live in Brooklyn.
I will do my best here: Describing a hipster is like describing a douchebag. Not only are they sometimes the same thing, but there is so much variety to their description. A hipster is a person who rages against the norms of society, pop culture and politics. A hipster is the hippie of this generation. Leftist, pretentious, often rude and unhygienic. They are usually dirt-poor or on rarer occasion a Trustafarian with enough Daddy Money to do and act how they want. Appearance is the dead give away of the hipster. The best way to describe them is a demographic who puts in a whole shitload of effort to look like they put in no effort. They will wear Goodwill bin- t-shirts, 1980's Pizza Hut sunglasses, use horrible foam-eared off-brand headphones from 30 years ago, wear a bowtie with a five-foot long scarf, high-cut gym shorts and laceless construction boots. Anything that us "normies" would not consider being caught dead wearing in public. Guys prefer scraggily, unshaven appearances or often support Tom Selleck moustaches. The girls are almost ALWAYS wearing glasses and are disheveled (aka NOT sexy) looking practically always. More often than not, they are not an attractive bunch. If you ask a hipster if they ARE a hipster, I have witnessed one of two things happen: they will give a sharp, flat-out "No.", or they will smell chum in the water and go into a pretentious, long-winded diatribe about how there IS no such thing as "hipsters" and it is insulting to say that to them, but on the other hand they're PROUD to be called a "hipster". And the bitch just kept ON going on to me and my friends, despite the fact I put my fingers in my ears at that point and was shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!" on the bar patio. Christ. Speaking of bars, The Hipsters took you American working-class cheap cowboy n' contruction beer, PBR, and turned into something expensive and "cool". It tastes bad, so that makes it good. No-filtered cigarettes taste horrible and are bad for you, let's all smoke them! You see the attitude here? It's all about IRONY. "Isn't my ironic teddy-bear t-shirt rad? Isn't saying 'rad' ironic?" There are different levels of hipsters and "scenesters", ever-changing and blending into the environments like the chameleon and the copycat elephant. The most typical party uniform for the hipster was skinny jeans, a super-fucking-duper low plunging V-neck shirt (with a faggy chest tattoo) Some sort of fucked-up facial hair, horned-rim glasses and a Blackberry constantly shoved in their face. However, there's no single way to describe them except that they are a photo negative of how anyone with better thing to do with their lives would dress. For example: ..those are women's polyester softball shorts, just in case anybody's curious. Then you get the REAL "in deep" hipsters. Kyle Kinane so pointedly described them as Hipster Serpico: they went too far and now they don't even know their own identities anymore, as if they were brainwashed into a cult: They listen to college rock or anything that generally sounds off-rhythm or with the production values and tone of an electric ham sandwich. They prefer living in the heart of downtown area almost always so they can be close to the coffee shops and sandwich shops they work in since they usually don't own cars and either use skateboard or fixed gear bicycles (have to use the most difficult bike, right?). Feel free to add, there's so much to this group.
You might be a hipster if you are wearing an old fashioned bathrobe and slippers on your front porch while smoking a wooden pipe.
Y'all just need to come to Minneapolis and sit around Lyndale Ave and Lake Street if you want to see some hipsters. We've got plenty. ...if it's your fixie, and stop signs don't apply to you. ...if you are wearing a flannel shirt from a thrift shop and call it "so lumberjack," and then giggle and talk about how you're afraid of axes. ...if your glasses have fake lenses.
I'm not sure why I dislike them so vehemently. The people Crown speak about are super hipsters. Or have they been the hipsters all along and everyone else tangentially like them are just the under 30 norm? Sidenote: I can't wait to see these people hit 40. It is going to be really, really sad. They may have started out celebrating PBR because they're cheap, but they genuinely care about good beer and improving brewing quality. They also feel the same way about cuisine. Turn on anything but Food Network and try to show me a chef that isn't bearded and/or tattooed up. Their music is the worst thing I've ever heard. Someone managed to turn bullshit into sound form and pump it into my ears, but I really can't stand any musical zeitgeist. So, like a grumpy old man with piles, I hate them just because they look different than me. It really is as ignorant as that. I hate their shitty beards and mustaches. I hate their fucking skinny girl pants. American Apparel's sole mission is to make women look ugly. Then apparently molest them. I hate neon clothes. I hate high waisted shorts; WHY DO YOU WANT TO GIVE YOURSELF MOM BUTT?? I hate that the bartenders dress up like its the 20s; fuck your fucking whore mouth. I hate I can't grow a curly mustache without folks mistaking me for one of them, despite half these people have pube face. I hate their fucking V-neck shirts. I hate their gauged ears and their fucking tattoos. I hate that they're saving the environment with their bike culture only because they're too poor to get a car. They are just awful people to look at. Which wouldn't be a problem if they weren't the cultural norm for young people.
Hip pointer If somebody wears skinny jeans or clear oversize glasses or some just minor fashion accessory that is typically associated with hipsters, I usually just kinda shrug. I mean, it's not for me, but then neither was Bjork's swan dress and I don't hate her. But, damn, the super hipster just makes me get angry. Every teenager rolls their eyes at their parents and assumes adults just don't understand them. Every teenager seeks to find their own identity and dials in on fitting in, not fitting in, style or lack of style, going with the flow or cutting against the grain and all that. Hipsters that drive me crazy are the ones who perpetuate these teen years, collectively rolling their eyes at the world, assuming that no one "gets it" but them. I am surprised nobody posted this yet: http://lookatthisfuckinghipster.tumblr.com/
Holy shit this is funny: The hipsters I hate the most are what I call the "1800's gentleman" hipsters. They look like Union Army officers, wild west saloon owners, lighthouse attendants and steam mill proprietors, except the actual aforementioned people weren't usually giant god damned pussies. It wasn't long ago that you actually had to be a real man to sport a long beard or curly mustache, as if you earned it somehow. Now it means fuck all. Spoiler I had a pretty long beard last winter, and while visiting some friends in the Twin Cities, I ended up in a bar near the area that Katokoch was talking about. I was approached all night by hipster girls who mistook me for one of them even though I was wearing normal sized jeans, a t-shirt and a ball cap. As soon as I mentioned that I was a farmer from a small town, they immediately looked at me like I just kicked open a dead skunk full of maggots. One of the small towns near where I live boasts having the most liberal of all liberal arts colleges, so even though we're in the middle of redneck farm country, the town is overrun with smug ex-hippy baby boomers and smelly hipsters. It's a complete mindfuck. The fact that a dipshit on a fixed gear bike has yet to blow a stop sign and be run over by a grain truck boggles my mind.
Hipsters are after my time, and I rarely encounter them, so this thread has been most educational. Hipster= pretentious asshole I think that about sums it up.
My wife and I have conversations about hipsters from time to time. We often come to the conclusion that we probably get confused for hipsters. We hang out in craft breweries, talking about indie music, in Chuck Taylors. There's a comic I stumbled upon a few years ago called Hipster Hitler... definitely worth checking out.
Hipsters put a lot of work into caring about looking like they don't care. They also seem to always be in costume, affected, and putting on airs. And fuck them for making PBR an $8 beer at the ballpark. Assbags.
When I was in Grand Rapids late this spring I went Founders which is downtown. I couldn't believe it, there were fucking hipsters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. How the hell can you be a hipster in the middle of one of the more bland, unexceptional cities out there? I just don't understand, clearly they must be posers. I get if you're in a trendy city and are doing trendy things. If you're in New York, its annoying but fine, LA, Denver, San Diego, Seattle, etc, but in Grand Rapids? It jus makes no sense.
Hipster is a word people use to dismiss anyone the least bit trendier or more urban than they are. Because, let's face it, half the shit people do on this board would be perfect for hipsters. Unless you somehow thought that discussing the finer points of which wood you should use to smoke the cut of meat you killed and butchered yourself in the smoker you also built yourself from reclaimed lumber was somehow not a hipster thing to do.
A hipster is someone who pays an insanely high rent for a one room apartment in a neighborhood that anyone normal would be terrified of being in during the day much less coming home at night with half a load on. A hipster is someone who will specifically pay extra rent because the apartment building is a 4 story walk up and it is retro to not have an elevator and walk up 4 flights to get home.
How the fuck is that hipster? That has been going on for hundreds of years, its not exactly trendy. Assuming you're not cold smoking cheeses and the like, I'd also like to see a proper smoker made from lumber.
You Are A Hipster That's not how I use it. I know their are a lot of people trendier and more urban than I am. In fact, pretty much everyone I know it trendier than I am. But, I don't think they're all hipsters. When I use the word hipster, I use it to describe hipsters, and I think in most of the discussion here so far, people were pretty clear on their agreement of using the word. So, on focus . . . you might be a hipster if you try to redefine the word hipster so that no one will call you that in a pejorative way.
To me, the concept of what is "hipster" revolves around middleclass (mostly white) millennials/Gen Y appropriating the concepts and fashions of other countercultures but ironically rejecting the values of those movements. A hipster will dress in punk or grunge clothing with a lumberjack beard, but will dismiss punk music and roll their eyes at the concepts of masculinity that would normally suit a rough lumberjack aesthetic. They're frustrating, because they cannibalize the aesthetics of important social movements, but ironically dismiss everything those countercultures stand for. They want the associated coolness of rejecting societal norms, but they don't want to have to stand for the values that justify rejecting society in the first place. Hipsters don't care that what made punk, grunge, beatnik etc movements "cool" is what they stood for and the clothes are only now cool because they are associated with those ideas. Essentially, the only thing a hipster stands for is being cool. I think hipsterdom arises largely because Millenials/Gen Y (of which I am one) as a generation have internalised the ideas of mass marketing. Hipsters think that if they just get jailhouse tattoos and grow a lumberjack beard they will have the dangerous/masculine/cool impression that used to be associated with those aesthetics. But of course, jail house tattoos only look tough, if you got them in jail. Just like mass marketing, hipsters come off like forced identities trying to tell you how different and special they all are. I think it's the wrong approach to label people who pursue obscure passions as hipster. Hunting game and smoking it for your own enjoyment is no more hipster than collecting stamps or modeling trains. But if you're doing it as a way to seperate yourself from the rest of society, to be different to and cooler than others. You may indeed be a hipster.