Hipsters: Postmodern Counter Culture

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Hipsters
The Oxford dictionary defines a hipster as, “A person who follows the latest trends and fashions, especially those regarded as being outside the cultural mainstream.”1 Hipsterism has formed into a postmodern counter culture that thrives off of the belief of individuality whilst obsessing over ironic folk and indie music, vintage thrift shopping, and the sweet taste of mainstream StarBucks coffee. The origin of this culture was given birth to by an array of its counter-culture predecessors: emos, goths, hippies, techno, rockabillies and more. Hipsters utilise the postmodern aspect of deconstructing past vogue and becoming sceptical and critiquing it through ironic fashion. What is odd is that most people who ascribe to these cultural …show more content…

A post modernistic approach by hipsters is the acceptance of ethnical diversity despite the fact that an overwhelming amount of the population is predominantly made up of Caucasian members. However this issue transcends past ethnicity and into the matter of social status and class. The hipster trend not only has a preponderance of the Caucasian race, but those members, more often then not, descends from the middle class of society. The question of why this group of middle class youth wanted to escape their often comfortable surrounds and educated life becomes and underlying matter. As considered by Wilkins being part of the monotonous, modernistic, white middle-class closely compares to being “boring vanilla”3. The transformation of becoming a hipster coincides with what could be the suppressed desire to escape the intrinsic association of dull, un-cool, white middle class portrayal to something more independent and postmodern. That group of youth feel compelled to strive for a new, individual look. Borrowing from past trends and appropriating it to reveal and essence of what each member believes is a very independent sense of style and therefore also opinion. Their main goal: to detach themselves from the norm and western modernity whilst rejecting the institutional cooperate

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