In the Fairfax papers on the weekend there was yet another rant about why hipsters are so not cool.
I find these rants intriguing …but they seem to read the cultural cues a little wrong. Through an old prism, somehow. So here I’m going to go into bat for these earnest, oddly cardiganed folk.
To confirm what a hipster is:
Hipsters covet lo-fi goods such as fixed-gear bikes and old-school Lomographic cameras. Their tastes run to 1950s furniture. They crave things that are obscure and typography-related. And they are disdainful of anything mainstream.
London’s Guardian describes a hipster, which historians say popped up in New York’s lower east side in 1999 as “squatting somewhere between MGMT, The Inbetweeners and Derek Zoolander [ouch!] … this modern incarnation is all mouth and skinny trousers”. And ipads, and second-hand shopping and cardigans and hanging in obscure coffee shops and having slashie careers (T-shirt designer/cafe owner/web design business etc).
You get the picture. (And I should confess that I certainly don a few hipsterisms: the black Buddy Holly glasses. The single-speed bike. Which is not why I feel compelled to defend hipsters.)
The thing is, critics bag out the affectations as being all about irony. And therefore flaccid.