MY SON AND I used to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was once in his stroller on Bedford Avenue when a twentysomething guy emerged from his apartment on North 8th Street decked out in full hipster uniform. He was as skinny as OC-era Mischa Barton, with miniscule black pegged jeans, a black T-shirt, dyed black hair, and a wide-brim, black hat of the sort Zorro might wear. My son gazed at him and said in the voice of the unselfconscious toddler, “Look at that old witch!” The guy, young and self-conscious, appeared humiliated.
I love this story. I don’t know exactly what causes my knee to jerk toward contempt when I speak of “hipsters” or pass these young, interestingly dressed people on the street, but I’m not alone. Not only would no one ever admit to being a hipster — it’s like claiming to be a JAP — it’s remarkable how attuned New York peers of mine are to the offensiveness of the skinny-jeans set. Take Andrew, a lawyer friend of mine in his late twenties who wears skater clothes in his private time, though he isn’t a skater. He leapt off the couch when I said I was writing about hipsters and regaled me with his opinions, all negative. The next day he sent me more thoughts. “At the risk of sounding like my grandfather (and father, for that matter), one problem I have with those damn kids is that a prime attribute of their character is to be a snob or to be pretentious,” wrote Andrew. He continued:
And yet, they don’t really create anything themselves. In this way, they are kind of like critics. Overall, their culture is that of the 21st-century slacker. I realize that this is a stereotype; I’m sure there are plenty of doctors, USAID workers and salt-of-the-earth types that have bushy mustaches, wear skinny plaid pants and showcase “I Eat Bush” t-shirts (in a cursive font, of course).
Andrew hates hipsters’ inauthenticity, he says, and defends his own adoption of skater regalia as an homage to a culture that is authentic. “I like the skater vibe because, while ‘skater’ used to be synonymous with ‘slacker,’ I don’t think that is true anymore. Now skaters are known as fearless extremists (like the Jackass guys). For the record, I am scared of my own shadow, so this character trait does not apply to me.”
To me, Andrew’s logic is contradictory. He hates that hipsters are hangers-on or snide critics alongside cultures of creators — real artists, musicians, and writers (the type who deserve to wear skinny jeans or ironic facial hair, I wonder?). But he is protective of his own desire to look like a skater, even though he doesn’t skate and isn’t particularly bold (the attribute of skaters that he admires). The distinction he appears to be making is that he loves skaters, whereas hipsters are too cynical and self-conscious to love a creative culture and imitate it.
Those who sneer at hipsters often belong to the hipster’s social class. Using myself as an example, I was a gentrifier in Williamsburg. Like the maligned hipsters, I used my parents’ savings to secure a place to live. While I was a single mother who lived check to check, and while I often woke up at night worrying about how I was going to pay the bills, I probably had more in common with the college-educated white hipsters in my neighborhood than with the working single moms, Polish and Latina, who were the long-time residents of my stretch of Brooklyn. I wanted grocery stores that carried organic products like Horizon milk for $6 per half-gallon, and overpriced but aesthetically satisfying coffee shops like El Beit. I needed expensive boutiques, otherwise I would have felt bad for having left Manhattan. I loved Bedford Cheese and Marlow & Sons and the extensive and rarefied selection of beers at Spuyten Duyvil. I hoped for property values to rise, so that I could sell my apartment for a profit.
Hipster hating speaks to our own fears and inadequacies more than it says anything real about real people. It’s like the hatred Martha Stewart provoked for showing women that you could make domesticity into an art and a multimillion dollar fortune, or the contempt many have felt for Hillary Clinton for proving that you could be more ambitious than most men and still be a mother. Hipsters remind us of . . . I don’t know — youth and daring and style, that we don’t have anymore or perhaps never did?
The critique of their physical appearance also makes me wonder about the gender of hipsters. They are feminized (skinny, fashion-y, coiffed) but they are also — to judge from the figures name-checked as hipsters during the panel — mostly men. Is there homophobia in the hipster-hating, a revulsion in seeing men who care “too much” about how they look? Is my own irritation due in part to the fact that hipsterism is male-dominated, just as n+1 is?
I MOVED OUT of Williamsburg. I now live in Greenwich Village, which is fusty and wealthy, but was once the province of bohemia. At 40, I’m young for my neighborhood, and it’s a relief not to be reminded every day of how old I’m getting. When I visit my old neighborhood, I smile at the leg warmers on the girls, the Sally Jesse Raphael glasses and thin asslessness of the men. I wonder what they see when they look at me. I pray no one says under his or her breath, “Look at that old witch.”