Hipsterism isn’t a fashion, it’s a reaction...

2016-02-12

...against Perspex and neon, against soft edged fonts and loud noises and being told what to think, say and do. It’s a statement that says, I like the old stuff! I like the things I was brought up with, that my parents and grandparents grew up with. I like old vellum and charred wood, frayed edges and hair. Hair! I like hair, long hair, beards, moustaches, all these things that are being denied in a size zero, androgynous modernity we inhabit. I like dolly mixture and sunsets, camp fires and long walks and vinyl records, not because I want to be a part of some exclusive club of cool kids but because I reject the alternative, that clean cut, cold hearted and clinical climate of collective conformity called modern life. Unable to react to it, to respond to it, to reject it outright, I find myself in a passive aggressive no mans land of simple pleasures, of checked shirts and hard boiled eggs, of pencil sharpeners and pot plants. And they know it, and they don’t like it. Try as they might they cannot capture it, market it, not beyond replicating sun bleached and burnished themes in their publicity shots, in using similarly serifed fonts and whimsical quotes in in their throwaway tag lines and ironically unironic marketing copy. But however hard they try, they cannot be it, because it implies an absence of precisely what they are trying to achieve. By looking to recreate nostalgia, they merely reinforce the reason we look for nostalgia in the first place. Meanwhile the real irony, that the point is lost on them, is lost on them. Hipsterism isn’t a fashion, it’s a reaction. And it will pervade.