At The Hedgehog Review Greg Jackson muses about the rise and fall and rise of hipsters:
On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged a decade ago at the epicenters of bohemia still filter out. Urban Outfitters is going strong. In Zürich, on the banks of the Limmat, elaborate tattoos cover the bodies of the children of Swiss bounty. The French use Brooklyn as a metonym for hip. In this context, in such saturation, hipster can no longer stand for anything, except perhaps the attempt or ambition to look cool. But since coolness venerates its own repudiation most of all, every considered choice bears hipster’s trace. Hipster is everything and nothing—and so it is nothing.
I think that for the last 50 years a considerable portion of the movement has been motivated by aspirations to be the “vanguard of the proletariat”. Contrary to the aspirations of vanguardists the real proletariat neither needs nor wants nor gives a damn about a vanguard.
I don’t think that any consideration of hipness particularly modern hipness is complete without mentioning Eric Hoffer’s observation:
Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
Another observation from Hoffer, particularly relevant for today:
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
