What is a Hipster?

[Bruce Banner]

So, I go to the #1 art school in the USA. Hipsters basically make up for a majority of the campus. I feel like I encounter a lot in The English Department (my major). Cheap beer, cigarettes, tattoos, plaid. Painters, musicians, actors, aspiring writers(like me) and everything else you can think of.

I think you guys hit the nail on the head when you said the whole pretentious, elitist, stuff, it's about the attitude more than anything.

However there are some Hipsters that have welcomed me(an outsider) with open arms and get along with them great.

 

[chamber-music]

Hipsters of East London have taken over the Dalston area in recent years as well. They opened up a Beyond Retro (vintage clothes store) in an old Daks warehouse where they filmed the Cuban cigar factory scene inJ ames Bond movie Die Another Day.


They call Stoke Newinton Road 'The Strip' to sound cool or some nonsense. They hang out in the Alibi dive bar or Dalston Superstore club or Efes pool hall/bar drinking Red Stripe and reading I-D or Dazed & Confused Magazine.


No wonder Shoes filmed that music video with Jake Gyllenhaal murdering Hipsters there.

MTV UK was going to do a Hipster 'The Hills' type reality tv show about the place a couple years ago.

Its like they watched Nathan Barley the Hipster satire back in 2005 and thought it was a documentary.

One of the reasons people don't like them is that the colonise areas marginalizing the local communities.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

Hipsters do somewhat defy description, and even some of their fashion sort of crosses over with other groups not necessarily considered Hipsters (like *****ebags, Nerds, Geeks, Mean Girls, Hippies, etc).

Hipsters are probably best defined as someone who tries incredibly hard not to be mainstream. Whereas others, found in other groups, may indeed completely not give a sh** and dress a certain way genuinely, Hipsters dress that way ironically.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

Hipsters are also walking paradoxes, they give a sh** about appearing like they don't give a sh**, rather than actually not giving a sh**. So they often play devil's advocate. They prefer to be seen as in the out group.

 

[Victarion]

I don't get the thing with irony. Why do they like to wear clothes that're ironic?

 

[terry78]

Basically hipsters have been around for decades, they were just called nerds.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

I don't get the thing with irony. Why do they like to wear clothes that're ironic?

Like they may wear a distressed Coca-Cola shirt because its "ironic" to be anti mainstream and wear a brand logo. Or maybe a meme T-Shirt. Then they accessorize to make it really "different" and "unique".

 

[chamber-music]

Hipster gentrification backlash has turned violent as anarchists go on the rampage attacking businesses in East London!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nti-gentrification-protests-turn-violent.html

Hundreds of protesters attacked a cereal cafe in east London on Saturday night, daubing the word “scum” on the shop window and setting fire to an effigy of a police officer.

Riot police were called in to defend the Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch after it was targeted by a large crowd of anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs’ heads and torches.

The owners of the cafe, which has been seen by some as a symbol of inequality in east London, said on Sunday that the attack left customers including children “terrified for their lives”.

The Metropolitan police said one of their officers had suffered an injury to his face as a result of a bottle thrown during the disorder, caused by a “criminal element within a group of several hundred people” who had thrown missiles and attacked shops on Brick Lane.

One protester who was at the demonstration said the Cereal Killer Cafe was targeted as a “symbol of gentrification”, although he said a nearby estate agent, Marsh & Parsons, was also attacked. The cafe, which opened in December, was open as usual on Sunday morning, with queues of customers paying up to £4.40 for a bowl of cereal.

The protest was advertised on Facebook as the third F*** Parade, and was apparently organised by the anarchist group Class War. The event page stated: “Our communities are being ripped apart – by Russian oligarchs, Saudi sheiks, Israeli scumbag property developers, Texan oil-money t**** and our own home-grown Eton toffs. Local authorities are coining it in, in a short-sighted race for cash by ‘regenerating’ social housing.

“We don’t want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing. We don’t want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns, we want community.”

Esther Planas Balduz, 55, an artist who attended the protest after hearing about it on Facebook, said she supported the cause because she was evicted from her home of seven years when her rent doubled last year.

“I’ve lived in Shoreditch for 17 years and it’s appalling what’s been going on. Its our fault, artists like me go to these kind of areas, then the architects follow, the developers, the hipsters etc,” Balduz said. “The problem is social cleansing. There are no protections for us. The law does not protect us, only the greedy landowners.”

From the Guardian

Only a matter of time before something like this happened in London with the affordable housing/council housing shortages and foreign luxury apartment boom in the city pricing some folks out.