2023-08-02 11:39:20
You have surely noticed it: these hipsters with lumberjack beards and CM2 caps, omnipresent yesterday, are now rare in major urban centres. Still the fault of Insta?
Close your eyes for a moment. Consider the last symmetrical mustache overhanging a flashy bow tie you came across on a Sunday stroll on the Right Bank in Paris. Yes, it’s not that easy. Normal: lately, the hipster as we knew and sometimes loved (yes) at the beginning of the century has become increasingly rare. Have these mainstream phobics, self-proclaimed avant-gardes, pros of unpopular-opinion and fluent in Anglicisms become a species to be protected? This social category, which results from a clever mix of startup-nation and vintage thrift store, will it disappear for good? In any case, let’s take advantage of this civilizational change: you can now admit that the spritz tastes like a twisted sock and that vinyl is a particularly inconvenient format.
But first, a bit of history. When we ask the New York sociologist Rob Horning (who imagined in 2009, for the zine PopMatters, “The Death of The Hipster” before making himself known, alongside Mark Grief and Kathleen Ross, with the sociological investigation ” What Was the Hipster?”) to give us his definition of a hipster, his answer was no longer that of fifteen years ago. Once upon a time, Rob Horning and Mark Grief wrote, “The hipster is that person, between the intentional dropout and the unintentionally downgraded individual – the neo-bohemian, the vegan, the cyclist or the skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or the twenties. post-racial, the starving artist or the graduate student – who in effect aligns himself with both the rebellious subculture and the ruling class, and thus opens a toxic conduit between the two. Today, in the light of subsequent trends, Rob argues: “Hipsters embody the transition from the ‘slacker’ (lazy) of the 1990s to the figure of influence of social media in the 1990s. 2010. They symbolize the kind of awareness that gets likes and such on social media before it even exists. »
SIPING HIS IPA
As for the French hipsters, remember their big, groomed beards, midsummer beanies, mustard-yellow suspenders to match their strobe-patterned socks. This species did not evolve in any environment. She was found in craft bars, sipping her IPA or her Sour Beer. At electro festivals, boasting minimal and indietronica. In concept stores for technophiles or audiophiles… You see the genre.
Still according to Rob: “They were trendy between 2000-2010. Which corresponds to the period before social media and GenZ took hold. During these ten short years, hipsters have managed the feat of being hated by the whole world. Almost an insult, Rob explains it this way: “Most people were trying to disavow ‘hipster’ which is an accusatory term used to describe other people, and it would be strange to identify yourself that way. »
Hipsters, like influencers, ultimately have in common their desire to expose their authenticity and uniqueness to the rest of the world: “Look how different I am from others. I only like weird and left out things, I’m so mysterious and surprising. What differentiates them, however, is that the influencer adopts a natural attitude in this exhibition, while the hipster, born too early in the era of social networks, does not have this lightness. Rob Horning pushes the reasoning further: “When influencers emerged in the 2010s, they occupied a conceptual space similar to that of hipsters, but without feeling the awkwardness of it. People were eager to identify themselves as influencers, as experts in self-presentation. Hipsters date from a time when this ability was suspect. A caveat: have you just mourned the hipsters? Well, we will have to prepare for the departure of influencers. According to Rob, they too will be replaced: “The influencer is in turn supplanted by the ‘creator’. A social media performer who exists in a video rather than a still photography environment. “And to think that we have just equipped ourselves, at the editorial office, with the latest generation selfie mirrors…
Par Fanny Mazalon
Photo Gabrielle Langevin
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#Hipsters