Consider hipster art. At the same time that hipsters were dressing like seventies-model Stanley Kowalskis, they were consuming culture that was considerably more anxious about machismo, heterosexuality, and maturity. Eggers tried to claim the older Flaming Lips as allies. The tensions of this art revolved around the very old dyad of adulthood and a child-centered world, but landed heavily on the side of the child.
Formally, there was an aestheticization of the mode of pastiche, which Fredric Jameson identified in the early eighties as a characteristic mode of postmodern narrative. Reflexivity was used as a means to get back to sentimental emotion. In the nineties, it had become commonplace to assume that one could no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright, because all genuine utterance would be stolen and repeated as advertising.
Whatever anguish this caused seemed gone in the artifacts of the early aughts. The ironic games were weightless. By , though, an overwhelming feeling of an end to hipsterism permeated the subculture. Suddenly, the hipster transformed. Certainly the points of reference shifted from midwestern suburbs to animals, wilderness, plus the occasional Native American. Best perhaps to call this the Hipster Primitive, for linked to the Edenic nature-as-playground motif was a fascination with early-eighties computer electronics and other rudimentary or superannuated technologies.
In culture, the Hipster Primitive moment recovered the sound and symbols of pastoral innocence with an irony so fused into the artworks it was no longer visible. On the electronic-primitive side, LCD Soundsystem. Listeners heard animal sounds and lovely Beach Boys—style harmonies; lyrics and videos pointed to rural redoubts, on wild beaches and in forests; life transpired in some more loving, spacious, and manageable future, possibly of a Day-Glo or hallucinatory brightness.
It was not unheard of to find band members wearing masks or plush animal suits. Where the White Hipster was relentlessly male, crowding out women from public view except as Polaroid muses or SuicideGirls , the Hipster Primitive feminized hipster markers; one spoke now of headdresses and Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, not just male facial hair.
Women took up cowboy boots, then dark-green rubber Wellingtons, like country squiresses off to visit the stables. Men gave up the porno mustache for the hermit or lumberjack beard.
Flannel returned, as did hunting jackets in red-and-black check. Scarves proliferated unnecessarily, conjuring a cold woodland night if wool or a desert encampment if a kaffiyeh. Then scarves were worn as bandannas, as when Mary-Kate Olsen sported one, like a cannibal Pocahontas, hungry enough to eat your arm. There were also some practical technological withdrawals. As CDs declined, LP records gained sales for the first time in two decades—seemingly purchased by the same kids who had 3, songs on their laptops.
The most advanced hipster youth even deprived their bikes of gears. The fixed-gear bike now ranks as the second-most-visible urban marker of hip, and not the least of its satisfactions is its simple mechanism. Please sign in or create an account. Description Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. Close Preview. Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations 1. Louis, USA About the contributors.
Anthology Editor Heike Steinhoff. Related Titles. Horror Films for Children. Catherine Lester. Fathers on Film. Katie Barnett. Hipster Culture. Heike Steinhoff. Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler. Noel Fitzpatrick.
Beyond The Bridge. Tobias Hochscherf. John Hartley. The News Media At War. Tarek Cherkaoui. Researching Communications. David Deacon. Wolfgang Ernst. The Digital Imaginary. Roderick Coover. Daniel Reardon. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. This chapter aims to explore the origins of the term hipster by comparing this contemporary subculture and its attitude toward mainstream culture with the hipster and the Beat culture of the s and s.
Mailer recognises African-Americans as the source of hip philosophy because their life on the fringes of American society rendered them suitable for rebellious ideas and actions. The jazz scene of the s was established primarily by African-American musicians and it could be identified as the source which engendered hipster and Beat subcultures. Reference Works. Primary source collections. Open Access Content. Contact us. Sales contacts. Publishing contacts. Social Media Overview.
Terms and Conditions. Privacy Statement. Login to my Brill account Create Brill Account. In We have never been Modern13, Bruno Latour promotes the cultural analysis and practices in terms of interdependence between social relation and material circumstance, focusing on the outcome deriving from their hybridisation. It means to leave back that critical approach that debunk the meaning of Hipsterism to a blind definition of incoherence. Rather, the core of such a complex phenomenon should be understood in the aggregation of values and meaning bounded with the subject-fetishes interactional changes, accepting the coexistence of contradictions, in a seemingly never-ending network.
As their attitude, the Hipster style seems to be hard to relate to a precise stereotype; through a Latourian lens is possible to have a more complete portrait of the multiform Hipster fashions, that engages artistic politico-aesthetics in the negotiation between identity-based belief and commercial orientation.
The Hipster style does not reflect a distinctively homogeneous set of tropes and it is consider more an utterance, a performing act of distinction through the manipulation of symbols and pre-existing codes. More than a critical, fixed standpoint, the Hipster within contemporary art as well as in fashion represents the continually deferred subject position of creative practice In this way, the study of Wes Hill on Hipster art can be transferred into the clothing domain, supposing that a certain attitude is mirrored in every cultural object creating a personal identity.
As the critic argues, today the ethical considerations of identity are eclipsed by the proclamation of cultural taste, mirroring the contemporary inability of discerning the capitalistic impulse for reinvention from the artistic impulse for subverting norms. Since the end of 90s, hipsters have gone through deep and diversified aesthetic forms: rather than a continuous visual style, they are referred as first adopters of aesthetics of the counter-mainstream aesthetic sensibility, based on 11 Ibid.
Skinny trousers, open shirts, beards, parkas, oversized glasses have been already replaced by new fashions of differentiations, portraying a vigorous research of nonconformist forms, rather than a visual coherence. Creative and well educated, the hipsters engage in a semiotic of cultural signs as well as in the expression of ethical and cosmopolitan understanding15, leaving rooms for the meeting of taste in all its aesthetic, critical, political forms. Due to their support to the local-micro business and the eco-progressists politics, we can identify a common theme in the fashion choices, based on the conscious recycling of vintage and second-hand clothes.
The layer-on-layer clothing intertwines recognizable styles: in the Hipster wardrobe it is easy to find Grunge, Hippie, Dandy, Preppy, Normcore, Athleisure, Pop, Rock-Punk and Boho-Chic footprints within a vintage framework. Following a Latouristic perspective, I should underline how the Haddow discourse take in account just the pejorative terms of the paradox, ignoring the opposite counterparts that are basis of the hipster pretentiousness: the ethical issue of re-adoption, and the effort to promote the acceptance of such testes that stands out of the Norm.
Recalling the Barthes Mythology17, we can argue that in fashion and art, trends have been always the result of an expressive reuse of codes: the hipster rebellion toward the dominant Norm is actualized into the conscious disruption of the context of meaning.
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