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The word hipster is usually applied to young people of North America and Europe and also in few cities of Latin America and Asia. In current parlance it can refer to the way one is dressed and may have connotations involving the circumstances of one's class and identity -- and the glaring contradictions of those circumstances.

Contents 1 History 2 Derogatory connotations 3 Image 4 Attempts at definition 5 Philosophy and irony 6 Class issues 7 Centres of Hipster Culture 8 See also 9 Related publications/websites 10 References

See also: Hipster (1940s subculture) and hip (slang)

"Hipster" derives from the word "hip." In the early days of jazz, musicians used the word "hip" to describe anybody who was "in the know" about the emerging, mostly African-American sub-culture, which revolved around jazz.^[1] They and their fans were known as "hepcats." Subsequently the word "hipster" was coined to replace "hepcat."

The first printed dictionary to list the word hipster is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," published in 1944 with Harry Gibson's first album, "Boogie Woogie In Blue." The entry for "hipsters" defined it as "characters who like hot jazz." This short glossary of jive expressions was also printed on playbills handed out at Gibson's concerts for a few years. It was not a complete glossary of jive, as it only included jive expressions that were found in the lyrics to his songs. The same year, 1944, Cab Calloway published "The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive," which had no listing for Hipster, and because there was an earlier edition of Calloway's Hepster's (obviously a play on Webster's) Dictionary, it appears that "hepster" pre-dates "hipster."

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In the late 1940s and 1950s hipster was a synonym for hep-cat, a lover of Jazz. In the 1959 book Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm (using the pen name Francis Newton) describes hipsters in terms of using their own language, "jive-talk or hipster-talk," he writes "is an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders." Hipster was also used in a different context at about the same time by Jack Kerouac in describing his vision of the Beat Generation:

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization... ^[2]

Nearly half a century later the term became a blanket description for the homogeneous trend in the "alternative", "anti-fashion" fashion of middle class and upper class urban, young people moving into "regentrified" or soon to be "regentrified" neighborhoods in city centers and displacing the former occupants of those neighborhoods unable to pay as much rent as this often wealthy and highly privileged section of society. Often hipsters came to these poorer neighborhoods from more comfortable, wealthy ones including the suburbs of major cities where many hipsters grew up. The word hipster was the sole subject of the book The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham published in 2003.^[3]

Today, especially in youth culture, the term hipster usually refers to young people who may have an appreciation for independent rock, a campy or ironic fashion sense, or an otherwise "bohemian" style.

Today's hipsters are typically associated most closely with a love of alternative culture, particularly alternative music. They are commonly perceived to be devout fans of indie or independent rock and/or independent film. Hipsters may also enjoy or create DIY crafts, and enjoy any or all forms of fine art including conceptual or performance art. Contemporary hipsters are sometimes associated with leftist or liberal social and political views, a general appreciation of intellectual pursuits, and an ironic appreciation of lowbrow or lower class culture and subculture.

Use of the word hipster in present day slang has developed distinct negative connotations, including: identifying that a person may be superficially following recently mass produced, homogeneous, urban fashion trends, overly concerned with their image and the contradictions of their identity, potentially anorexic, disingenuously appropriating a pseudo-artistic image or "a collage of other urban identies" from the past, or simply an elitist. Similar to other social groups, hipsters have been accused of exercising peer pressure to persuade other members of the group to adopt certain attitudes and ideas. Though many hipsters are seen to identify strongly with the perceived rarity and exoticness of their particular fashion and tastes, the phenomenon of moving into city centers and adopting "new" urban attitudes toward fashion, design, and culture is currently a major social trend and is the subject of numerous reality and home improvement television shows. Often in its negative connotation, 'hipsters' are considered apathetic, apolitical, and self-entitled by other, often marginalized sectors of society they live amongst, including previous generations of bohemian and/or "counter-culture" artists and thinkers.

There are many associations made to hipsters that can be considered stereotypes. Hipsters are often seen as having a predilection towards vintage items, such as vintage clothing and vinyl records. They may be considered artistic or otherwise concerned with matters of taste. Even certain products or foods can be associated with hipsters, such as Pabst Blue Ribbon or shade-grown fair-trade coffee.^{[citation needed]}.

Associations with certain publications and other media also exist. Certain magazines like Vice and the website Pitchfork Media could be viewed as hipster-affiliated because they skew to a certain demographic and contain criticism of music.

The modern stereotypical hipster is identified, if only superficially, with the working class. Pabst Blue Ribbon emerged from historically low sales after being adopted by the hipster subculture in Portland, Oregon. Executives of the company had noticed that sales were growing without explanation. Further research found a local Portland bar The Lutz had changed its offering to Pabst after a local beer went off the market. It was found that the local community was made up of a large counterculture along with working class people who had adopted Pabst.^[4] The popularity of Pabst has spread, possibly due to this cultural context, and possibly also to a memorable reference in the David Lynch film Blue Velvet, and it is now a popular beer among young people perceived to be hipsters.

Likewise, Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York sees metrosexuality as the hipster appropriation of gay culture. But for Lorentzen, the modern hipster drinks in underground culture with a heavy dose of irony and insincerity. He writes that "these aesthetics are assimilated — cannibalized — into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod."[1]

Defining the characteristics of a "hipster," as a current subcultural idiom still evolving, are impossible to state with full authority.

By the above-mentioned definitions, a picture of the consensus image of a hipster comes into some focus. Particularly, a hipster usually is characterized as possessing some of the following characteristics:

• A liberal, ecological, and/or anti-capitalist political ideology. This could be as concrete as being a member of the Green Party or espousing socialist philosophies, or simply being an American Democratic Party or European Labour Party supporter. Socially, this means intrinsic support of women's rights and gay rights, especially since one hipster stereotype is being perceived as androgynous or bisexual despite one's actual lifestyle.
• The active pursuit of indie, independent, DIY, non commercial, and/or non profit choices of consumption in any and all aspects of life, including listening to independent rock or any form of non-mainstream music, thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local microbrew beer, listening to public radio, etc.

While perhaps a majority of the young people potentially labeled hipsters are so categorized strictly due to their appearance, the overall aesthetic is occasionally representative of a specific liberal ethos. The vintage clothing and thrift store appearance of hipsters in a modern liberal context reveals a wish to consume ethically; to not buy new clothes from large corporations accused of harsh, unfair, and cruel working conditions or even slave labor, such as Gap and Nike. The choice to consume ethically reveals what some would call realism, and others the cynicism, of a youth culture that agrees with the sentiment that most people will not "make a difference." Thus, the most important way such a person can influence the political and societal world around them is to admit that one's only true voice in a capitalist society is as a consumer, and thus one should consume ethically. This choice usually manifests itself in refusing to purchase items from large corporations such as clothing, but also extends to personal transit (biking, using public transportation, driving hybrid or bio-diesel vehicles), musical taste (bands not signed to major labels or who use their creative output in the service of the advertising industry), etc. For instance, once the hipster aesthetic caught on in the mainstream and "faux-thrift store" pre-faded t-shirts were available for sale as new items manufactured overseas with questionable labor involved (in stores such as Urban Outfitters and Target), the morally-motivated hipster would shun buying or wearing them, while a purely appearance-minded hipster would possibly embrace them.

The hipster aesthetic of irony, and ironic distance, is not uniform or agreed upon. While some people categorized as hipsters will claim to like a band like Iron Maiden because that hipster finds them amusing, others categorized as hipsters will claim to genuinely enjoy Iron Maiden's music and aesthetic. The enjoyment of culture in many aspects, from music to television to film, has some tinges of irony for the hipster. A hipster might watch a show like Three's Company because it is "so bad it's good," or claim to genuinely enjoy it. Many hipsters claim to have "guilty pleasures" which appear to clash with an otherwise liberal or indie aesthetic, such as religiously reading People Magazine despite otherwise only listening to NPR and refusing to watch television due to the prevalence of advertising and crass capitalist consumerism. These types of juxtapositions are at the core of the hipster's relation to irony and popular culture, hence it can even be assumed by some people that irony can be seen as an excuse for hypocrisy.

The conflicts and paradoxes of irony enter the popular perception of the hipster in how that term is related to social and economic class, enhanced by the lack of full college scholarships for liberal arts majors. Since liberal thought, intellectualism, and a deep knowledge of independent music and film are all defining aspects of being a hipster, the fact that hipsters are seen to espouse such working class aspects of culture appears either ironic or disingenuous. The common perception of a hipster who receives minimum wage working as a barista, copy shop employee, music store employee, "hip" restaurant worker, or other job which provides low pay (yet lives in a gentrified "hip" part of town) does exist, but if said hipster indeed has a college education and a likely upper-class or middle-class upbringing, there arises a paradox of identity. From this conflict of class background vs. perceived current economic class, a stereotype exists of a hipster who receives rent and other financial assistance from their upper-class parents, sometimes referred to as a "trust fund hipster."

Hipsters have become associated with particular neighborhoods of many large cities. The Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York and Hoxton, London are examples of areas that have developed into hipster strongholds in recent years. Wicker Park and Logan Square are strong hipster areas in Chicago. The Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg districts of Berlin are also known to be hotspots of hipster culture, with real estate price levels skyrocketing and students and artists and people with higher income levels from former West-Berlin or even Western Germany moving in. San Francisco's Mission district is also considered an epicenter of hipster pride.

• The Hipster Handbook
• Indie (music)
• Indie (culture)
• Independent film
• DIY culture
• Kitsch
• Camp (style)

• Hipster Hunter - Guide to understanding hipster scene
• The Fader
• Vice Magazine
• Pitchfork Media
• Ignore Magazine
• Brooklyn Vegan
• Paper Magazine
• Mass Appeal
• Indie Krush - Indie Music & Art Collective in Las Vegas
• I Heart Comix - Indie Promoter & Record Label in California