the HIPSTER REPORT debuts MONDAY

No cultural figure was issued their death certificate as many times as hipsters. For 15 years, hipsters were the skinny jean-wearing boogeymen who enraged the world by crossing the wires between irony and earnesty, individuality and conformity. Hipsters were the canvas onto which everyone projected their conflicting ideas about what was wrong with young, college-educated people living in the city.

Many presume hipsterdom died off, but they’re wrong. The social habits hipsters created are the background software we’re still running on today. The idea of being an amateur connoisseur of culture, someone who obsesses over news updates about their niche interests and micro-celebrities they passionately argue about with strangers, someone who eats well because it tastes better and is better for the environment, someone who wears well-researched vintage clothes, someone who’s relentlessly critical of the aesthetic decisions made by those most similar to them – today, this isn’t someone, this is everyone. We’re all hipsters now.

For this report, I’ll try to pinpoint what the slippery word hipster means by untangling each of the four eras of hipsterdom and how they changed over time. To do so requires looking back at the origins of hipsters in the 90s when Americans were granted digital access to culture just as the service economy encouraged us to commodify our lifestyles. I’ll recount the rise and fall of the companies that defined this lifestyle –from Pitchfork to Vice Magazine to American Apparel– to understand the relationship between hipsters and their corporate representatives. With the onset of social media, hipsters found it necessary to represent themselves and were heavily influenced by the Hipster Runoff and Party Photographers. From here, I look at the public’s hatred of hipsters for real and imagined reasons. Finally, I describe the mid-2010s transition from The Hipster of yesterday into The Activist of today and what the Indie Sleaze revival says about both.

So crack open a can of Sparks and join me as we dig into hipsters' legacy—not as an exercise in nostalgia but as a way of understanding how they shaped the culture we live in now. This is The Hipster Report.

video edit by Jak Ritger

song Sky Ferreira - Everything's Embarassing (u_tra remix)