Hipster what is

Typically progressive in politics, hipsters in the time frame are often retro and anti-tech, renouncing the latest high-style fashions and gadgets. The moniker dates back to the s when jazz was the "hip" music to listen to.

See Luddite. A person who is keenly interested in the latest trends or fashions. One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes. A member of Bohemian counterculture. This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term hipster is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on. The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc.

It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives. He does not earn them. It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent any traditional bohemia are hangers-on.

Somewhere, at the center, will be a very small number of hardworking writers, artists, or politicos, from whom the hangers-on draw their feelings of authenticity. Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core.

Among hipsters, the skills of hanging-on—trend-spotting, cool-hunting, plus handicraft skills—become the heroic practice. The most active participants sell something—customized brand-name jeans, airbrushed skateboards, the most special whiskey, the most retro sunglasses—and the more passive just buy it.

Of course, there are artists of hipster-related sensibility who remain artists. In the neighborhoods, though, there was a feeling throughout the last decade that the traditional arts were of little interest to hipsters because their consumer culture substituted a range of narcissistic handicrafts similar enough to sterilize the originals. It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.

And hipsterism did not make an avant-garde; it made communities of early adopters. To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. True countercultures may wax and wane in numbers, but a level of youth hostility to the American official compromise has been continuous since World War II.

Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities. One glimpses behind them the bike messengers, straight-edge skaters, Lesbian Avengers, freegans, enviro-anarchists, and interracial hip-hoppers who live as they please, with a spiritual middle finger always raised. And hipster motifs and styles, when you dig into them, are often directly taken from these adjacent countercultures.

The fixed-gear bike came from bike messengers and the anarchist culture of groups like Critical Mass and Bikes Not Bombs. Hipster approval of locavore food because local cheeses and grass-fed beef are expensive, rare, and knowledge-intensive brings elitism to the left-environmentalist campaign for deindustrialized agriculture. Can the hipster, by virtue of proximity if nothing else, be woken up? Yet the mainstreaming of hipsterism to the suburbs and the mall portends hipster self-disgust.

Why bother with a lifestyle that everyone now knows? More important, it guarantees the pollination of a vast audience with seeds stolen from the counterculture.

And might they still germinate? Something was already occurring in the revivification that transpired in Save Word. Definition of hipster. Examples of hipster in a Sentence a movie that appeals equally to hipsters and suburbanites.

Recent Examples on the Web Fortunately, the hipster -friendly experience lacks the snootiness that often accompanies such projects in the Hudson Valley. First Known Use of hipster , in the meaning defined above. History and Etymology for hipster hip entry 2. Learn More About hipster. Time Traveler for hipster The first known use of hipster was in See more words from the same year. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Trending: Hipsterism Trending: Hipsterism When a Reddit thread investigated what it means to be a hipster.

Bork adherents are horrified by the hipster s, who, they say, will turn back the clock and use antitrust laws to solve a host of vague social ills that the law is ill prepared to address. For tech companies, hipster enforcement will be particularly problematic.

Today, the city is an Asian hipster outpost, with shopping malls, clothing boutiques, and mixologist-prepared cocktails.