Hipsters: Counter-Culture or Consumer Group?

August 1st, 2008

Hipsters: Counter-Culture or Consumer Group?

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Nobody can agree on who or what is a hipster, but everybody hates them, primarily because the hipsters hate everything that is mainstream, and therefore not hip.

Now, even hipsters hate hipsters, or at least, hate to be called hipsters.

Advertisers and trendhunters are, perhaps, the only people who like hipsters — both as a consumer group with an insatiable thirst for the new, and an early adopter group to tip trends into the mainstream.

It’s really ironic that a subculture with a liberal/ anti-establishment/ anti-brand philosophy (traditional hipsters) has transformed into become a an empty, recursive, self-referential focus group for marketers (ironic hipsters).

The Adbusters cover story on hipsters (via PSFK and MetaFilter) set me off on a three day search on the internet for more insights into “hipsters consumerism”. The result is a work-in-progress collection of links which may well become “the ultimate guide to hipster consumerism”.

Douglas Haddow in Adbusters –

In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

Elise Thompson in LAist –

Hipsters are the ones walking around with two-toned pink and black hair, wearing expensive “alternative” fashion. Hipsters go to the latest, coolest, hippest bar. They listen to the latest, coolest, hippest band. But they don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy or to have an allegiance to any particular genre of music. Whatever it is, as long as it is the latest and the coolest and the hippest, they have to have it. They are like soldiers of fortune of style.

Alan Wolk in MarketingProfs Daily Fix –

If all the ads you see on television sound like they’ve been written by the same person, a slightly snarky, all-knowing young hipster, odds are they have. Or, more accurately, by a crew of people who all strive to have the same voice: that of the creative directors who judge award shows.

And while the work that wins at these shows (especially the big ones) is often great, it’s generally work that appeals far more to the upscale, urban, 30something white male hipsters who judge these shows than it does to say, your grandmother.

Now this theory is fine when you’re advertising beer or running shoes. But since most products advertised aren’t beer or running shoes, we quickly find ourselves in trouble: we’re talking with one voice to an audience who speaks with another. And whether it’s TV, print or online (okay, especially online), the messages we’re putting out there are “we don’t really know you, our customers. We don’t really care what you think is cute or funny or emotional. We only care what’s cool and hip (by our standards) so get used to it.”

Kerry Da Silva in Hybrid Magazine –

Through our research, we have recently discovered that behavioral scientists were employed by the top five U.S. corporations to produce an overall plan that would guarantee profits and alleviate the pressure to advertise. These scientists came up with a plan to create a new, scientifically engineered breed of human that would specifically buy high-priced label merchandise and also act as supposed “models of fashion”. They referred to these new humans as “hipsters”. By creating more hipsters and exclusive “models of fashion” hipster circles, scientists correctly predicted that those who enviously aspire to belong to that group are therefore enticed to purchase similar material possessions gain access to these circles. The profitable benefit to these top companies has been unsurpassed.

Rob Horning in Pop Matters –

The aggressiveness of advertising forces hipsters into aggressive countermoves, quick shifts in allegiance to avoid seeming like marketing’s dupes. Eventually, collaborating with the forces of marketing, or conceiving of yourself as a brand, becomes an even more sophisticated strategy for evading marketing’s manipulation. Becoming collaborators becomes a kind of advanced subversive strategy. It seems unfair to blame hipsters for this when the degree to which life has become media saturated has made marketing that much harder to escape. Hipsterism is a symptom of a larger cultural disease.

Thermidor on Everything 2 –

The postmodern aspects of this trend (of the ironic hipster) are at once evident: the hip is un-hip, and vice-versa. To reject the current hegemony one must accept and bask in consumerism, if only superficially. Deviancy requires partaking of mass culture. Living in society today involves a bombardment of advertising and popular forms; it is perhaps natural to take on chunks of popular idioms and construct an identity based on contradictory bricolage. The move towards irony can be interpreted as an end to claims of authenticity; everyone recognizes the pretense behind every art form and expression of selfhood; if one can purposefully construct an identity based on material objects, nothing is real, so we are obliged to bring silliness to the forefront.

Excerpt from ‘Hip: The History’ by John Leland (via NPR) –

Hip sells cars, soda, snowboards, skateboards, computers, type fonts, booze, drugs, cigarettes, CDs, shoes, shades and home accessories. As Lord Buckley suggested, it serves the treasury well. By bringing constant change and obsolescence, it creates ever-new needs to buy. Though it grabs ideas from the bottom of the economic ladder, hip lives in luxury. Poor societies worry about growing enough corn; rich societies can worry about being corny. Hip shapes how we drive, whom we admire, whose warmth we yearn for in the night. Its scent transforms neighborhoods from forbidding to unaffordable. The fashion designers Imitation of Christ built a thriving label by murmuring a mantra of hip over thrift store clothes, then selling them for hundreds of dollars. Hip brings the intelligence of troublemakers and outsiders into the loop, saving the mainstream from its own limits. What’s in Williamsburg today will be in the mall tomorrow; today’s Vice magazine or Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling is tomorrow’s Good Housekeeping or SmackDown. Like the advertising world that grew up alongside it, hip creates value through image and style. In its emphasis on being watched, it anticipated the modern mediascape, which values people not for what they produce or possess but for their salience as images. For all its professed disregard for wealth, hip would not have thrived unless it was turning a profit.