White City

Top-notch street style is no longer the priviledge of London, Tokyo or New York. Meet hipsters, or global scenesters: they are cool, they are hip, they are everywhere. Being cool has never been so easy. Hipsters are seriously considered the biggest downfall counterculture ever had — young generation of carefully marketed consumers has never been so lost.

It is 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. We are standing in line, waiting to buy bagels, to soak up all the beer we drank previously. This is following an evening spent in a well-known club, listening to three unsigned indie-bands, the last one consisting of two guys in diapers, screaming into microphones, in between fiddling with laptops and guitars. The place is Brick Lane, a famous Bangladeshi neighborhood in East London, recently discovered by the young and fashionable who have turned it into a “must-see” area, where the traditional curry houses that serve no alcohol are crammed between coffee shops, bars, boutiques and clubs. Surrounding me are guys in skinny jeans, with large, but fake glasses, girls clad in summer dresses with big belts, leggings and lacquered high heel sandals, warmed up by the quantity of alcohol they have consumed. The question is: “Are these people hipsters?”

If asked, they would probably disagree in disdain, as no one really embraces the label — this is a culture that does not want to be named. However, media-savvy observers, who have coined the title everyone rejects, know that this is actually a subculture, at first glance appearing too elusive and highly individualistic to be even considered as a movement. Yet, it is united in the diversity of styles and tastes its members appropriate. Urban Dictionary offers a range of definitions, some looking favorably upon the phenomenon, stating that hipsters “are people in their teens to 20’s who generally listen to indie rock, hang out in coffee shops, shop at thrift stores and talk about things like books, music, films and art.” Others are calling this fad for what it is, claiming that hipsters are “a bunch of fakers.” Originating from the locations where we get most of the information valuable for our daily existence, hipsters mostly reside in New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paolo or Paris or anywhere else, where skinny jeans are available in both female and male versions.

Where I come from, we are fighting the real fight over who gets to be called urban and who gets to be called that other thing (provincial, not from the “center,” a turbo folk fan, a potential member of organized crime, a nationalistic football hooligan, a future wife of a shady businessman). Don’t worry though, it is not like we are missing out on the latest trends. Hipsters do exist even here. It is hard to miss them in your regular night crawling; hipsters are boys and girls, looking disinterested and careless, but passionate about clubbing, drinking and music festivals. I ask Luka, a Belgrade-based journalist and musician who he thinks is a hipster, he tells me that “it is just another word we can not translate from English.” Then, he sends me a link of a blog called Hipster Runoff, which posts party-pics, under a headline “Just Searching 4 Authenticity + what will be big in 2k12.”

Hipsters dress in a mix-and-match style of vintage clothes and new designer labels such as Urban Outfitters or American Apparel, which are ordinary cotton shirts that are re-branded into desirable items. Androgynous British model Agyness Deyn, with her peroxide pixie haircut, is a hipster fashion icon. Not proclaiming ambitions or career plans, the ultimate goal of a true party hipster is to have their picture snapped and featured on a high profile blog like New York’s Gawker or Sartorialist.

Hipsterdom is usually associated with indie-rock, but, to be more precise, a true hipster is endlessly eclectic – they like hip hop, atmospheric electronica, outlandish genres such as freak folk, twee-pop or gritty urban rhythms of different flavors propagated by acts like the London-born Sri Lankan M.I.A., Brazillian super groups such as CSS or Bonde De Rolo or essentially black genres like dubstep or grime.  Among hipsters, the eighties have been finally avenged -– both its fashion and its music. What unites them all is their music player; most of the urban army, wearing white Ipod earphones you encounter in public transportation, are hipsters.

The music bible for hipsters is definitely Pitchfork webzine. Started in 1999, Pitchfork announced the death of the music press, tapping into the collective need to have a media suitable for fans, who consume music digitally, like to flaunt their new discoveries and distrust any authority. Pitchfork editors are known for their over-intellectualizing writing style and awareness that in order to stay hip, you have to be unpredictable (yesterday’s favorites have to be dethroned today). The relevance is apparently totally irrelevant, either critical or commercial — after choosing Panda Bear’s Person Pitch as the album of the year in 2007, one can wonder whether any of the people who actually chose it, ever listened to it?
Another media vehicle associated with hipster subculture is Vice magazine. Originally established in Montreal but moved to New York in 1999, it is published in several countries including Japan, Germany, Holland and Mexico and distributed freely in approved stores. Vice mixes trailer park aesthetic with art photography, while its journalistic pieces push the boundaries with its crudeness and irony (notably the article The Vice Guide to Shagging Muslims, which deserved a ban on several US college campuses). According to Vice, the voice of the zeitgeist is “We don’t give a fuck.”

For a culture whose chief characteristic is individualism, it is hard to pinpoint hipster values aside from their fashion sense and proclivity to get new music off audio blogs. It is hard to say whether hipsters have an ideology –- who do they vote for, do they care about the environment or which social class they belong to. Some might be tagged simply because of their style of dress or taste in popular culture. Some really buy into the whole lifestyle. Detachment and sardonic wit are the mostly likely sentiments to be found among hipsters.

A popular myth is that hipsters are actually high-class kids who are “slumming it,” downplaying their actual social status, pretending to be bohemian. London’s East End has always been a cradle of working-class and immigrant poor. Today, however, areas such as Shoreditch, or the already mentioned Brick Lane, are popular haunts of youth ready to party. Among them, it is frequently heard that everyone on the scene are actually children of rich parents from better-off parts of West or North London, who don their Alexandar McQueen’s to go with dirty Converse All Stars. Similarly in New York, a regular hipster lives in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg; the locals consider everyone living in this area to be one.

Apparently, hipsters are inextricably linked to media. They feed off each other, leading us to think that it is not a subculture at all, but a by-product of media in a contemporary fragmented cultural landscape. There are already several guides on how to become a hipster available in bookshops, written by self-proclaimed experts. One cannot tell where the real thing ends and incorporation starts.

It is right to assume that subculture has to come from below, from the underground, from the suburbs or immigrant boroughs. Its music has to be loud, obnoxiously demanding attention, conveying our troubled collective subconsciousness to those who do not want to hear about it. In regards to style, there must haven been a reason why Kurt Cobain look-alikes wore flannel shirts and Doc Martins, why hip hop fans put on baggy jeans and fake diamond chains. It cannot only be fashion, right? They were trying to tell us something about the state of society and their place in it. At that time, it meant rejecting the baby-boomer lifestyle of their parents or emulating the look of those who successfully got out of the ghetto. The fact that the many kids today are wearing keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, unfortunately does not mean that they support the struggle of people in Gaza and the West Bank. Most likely, they have picked it up in H&M or a similar global chain store, where the item is available in many colors, including pink. By doing so, the scarf, like the culture itself, becomes devoid of meaning, pronouncing the ultimate victory of style over substance.

This view is reinforced by the notion that a hit-driven culture, or mainstream, is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Internet technologies have made unparallel choice of cultural artifacts available. In the past few years, it has proven difficult to produce, package and sell anything of cultural value to millions of people. Instead, anyone utilizing Amazon, Itunes or peer-to-peer sharing networks can get a hold of anything they ever wanted, however obscure it might be. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, termed this as “long tail,” meaning that only a limited number of items sell in huge numbers, all that is left is a long tail of various products, which do not sell as much, but combined comprise a huge untapped market. In this sense, hipsters are God’s given gift to niche marketing.
The voice of anti-consumerism, Adbusters magazine recently launched an attack on hipsters, under the headline “Hipsters: The Death of Western Civilization.” They exposed the culture as completely reiterative, mired deep in the past, yet superficial and utterly consumerist, no matter how hard it pretends not to be. Faced with the vitriol exuding from the article, you are bound to feel pity for the poor souls, who just want to go out, dress up and listen to their mix of copy-paste music. They simply reflect it the ills of today’s society. Can anyone today act outside the boundaries of the media/consumer culture? Some might remember punk as the last authentic grass-roots subculture. Today’s kids will however wonder how someone like the anti-establishment figure John Lydon is currently featured in an advertising campaign for a brand of butter.

It seems that the recent backlash at hipsters is a part of the traditional bantering between actors on the urban scene, along the lines of “my cool is way cooler than yours. I am real, you are fake.” Unlike any other previous subculture group, hipsters are not quick to stick to their guns and defend their movement, as there is actually no movement at all. No one likes to be called a hipster in a first place. The name is a media invention, which is why people whom you might assume are hipsters use it with a negative overtone. Calling someone a hipster is an insult, even if being one is cool. If hipsters are cool by definition, if they are a signpost of where to go out, how to dress and what music to listen to, then they are indispensable to the functioning of every city on the planet, much like utility services. And they are here to stay.