Let us set the scene: It is the drab winter of 2010. “Modern” design, the sweetheart of well heeled, fad-following ‘00s aesthetes, has fallen on hard times; the once booming global economy that fueled so much consumer frenzy is mired in a mind-numbing recession; the Internet is the prime method of information dissemination and glossy home magazines are feeling the crunch; and the hipster—that peculiar amalgam of calculated cool and uncaring chic mixed with annoying irony and unceasing self-absorption—unbelievably still rules the urban playgrounds of San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York.
It was in this setting that in late January, a new, mysterious blog authored by an anonymous duo took the design world by its Eames lounge chair and flung it to the mat. Unhappy Hipsters’ original approach was simple: hijack images from Dwell magazine—the darling of mod-loving, cool-craving, design snobs—in order to deliver a swift kick to the groin of misappropriated modernism. Placing Dwell’s starkest images out of context and pairing them with irreverent captions (“It was unclear how her life had become so riddled with obvious metaphors” or “Such was his loneliness that he’d took to preparing elaborate feasts with the front doors wide open in hope that someone—anyone—would happen by”) proved to be a potent combination, and Unhappy Hipsters exploded, adding a much-needed sardonic twist to the ever-changing whims of the design-consuming public.
In order to fully understand the brilliant level of irony that Unhappy Hipsters added to the ongoing design dialogue, it’s necessary to take a trip back in time to October 2000 when a bright young thing of a magazine dedicated to modern architecture and design was launched. With its “Fruitbowl Manifesto,” penned by feisty founding editor in chief Karrie Jacobs, the San Francisco–based Dwell declared all-out war on the powers that be and aimed to poke more than a little fun at the pretentious perfections of Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, and even Metropolis, where Jacobs had cut her teeth for many years.
“At Dwell, we’re staging a minor revolution,” Jacobs wrote. “We think that it’s possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.”
But this manifesto was much more than words. Dwell’s assault on the buttoned-up architectural world was most effective in its photography. Painstakingly stylized interiors were replaced by sweeping shots of comparably humble (though often daring) spaces, replete with clothes on the ground, dishes in the sink, and even a ping-pong table or two. And maybe the most shocking deviation from the architecture and design magazine norm was the presence of the actual homeowners—in their pajamas, in their sweatpants, in their best stay-at-home-and-do-nothing attire—in their homes. It conveyed the seemingly obvious but oft-obscured message: Real people live here.
It was an exciting time, and I was pleased to be a part of the original rabble-rousing crew that continually shocked and awed a previously hermetically sealed profession. From our cozy confines on Osgood Alley in San Francisco’s North Beach, we had, at times, too much fun hurling challenges at the status quo. But like most things, as Dwell grew and matured, the once rowdy start-up slowly but surely began mirroring the establishment it once mocked.
Dwell had become the old guard, the purveyors of good taste, and it was time for the elder statesmen to be challenged. It now sits at the precipice of architectural publishing—the grown-up cool kid searching for its soul in a landscape of shifting mores.Unhappy Hipsters provided a moment of relief from the pressures of perfection. A reminder that, as Karrie Jacobs stated in that very first issue of Dwell more than ten years ago, “We think that we live in fabulously interesting times. And that no fantasy we could create about how people could live, given unlimited funds and impeccable taste, is as interesting as how people really do live (within a budget and with the occasional aesthetic lapse).” The team behind Unhappy Hipsters might have added an addendum to that: Never, ever forget your sense of humor.
—Andrew Wagner, editor in chief, ReadyMade magazine