What is a hipster?

A current-day hipster is a person in their twenties or mid-to-late teens who wears thrift-store clothing, skinny jeans, tight v-neck t-shirts, layers of mismatched wool, scarves, and old-school shoes such as Converse All-Stars, Pumas or Vans. Massively dark-framed glasses complete the look, whether they are integral to vision clarity or not. Hipsters also are enamored of trucker hats, fixed-gear bicycles, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

A strong identifying marker of hipsters is their affinity for listening to independent music; anything unknown in the mainstream.  This penchant for rejecting the mainstream and being “in the know” about up-and-coming music carries over into other areas of taste and thought, with a marker of hipsterism being that there is value in having unspoken knowledge that those outside the subculture cannot possibly understand.  Essential to the “knowing” is the practice of slang or outright language invention that increases the likelihood that no outsiders will gain that forbidden fruit of knowledge.  

Hipsters tend to live in impoverished neighborhoods in urban areas, which when combined with their thrift-store mode of dress, mysterious “knowing” and rejection of anything mainstream, lends them an aura of bohemianism.  But their lack of commitment to any unifying cause brands their bohemianism as false and contrived. Perhaps Gawker expresses it best with the term “fauxhemian” as quoted by Mark Greif in his article entitled, “What Was the Hipster?”.

It is a cold hard fact that the hipster subculture is the business of the young and inexperienced. Old people need not apply. After all, they’ve already been there, done that. Hence, perhaps the sharpest irony in all this hipsterish-isness is that in steeping themselves in their fauxhemian ways, hipsters have avoided becoming like their parents’ generation, and have metamorphosed directly into characters from their own grandpa and grandma’s generation. Substitute “The Establishment” for “Mainstream” and one can see that everything old is new again. Rinse and repeat.