# Hipster Hipster is a stereotype label for young urbanites who signal alternative taste through indie music, thrift fashion, and studied nonconformity. The tag got scooped up from 1940s jazz slang, dusted off in Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book, and by the mid-2000s it powered a wave of blogs, satires, and hate groups that made hipster-bashing one of the internet's favorite pastimes. ## Origin "Hip" is old American slang for being fashionably current, and "hipster" first attached to Bebop and swing jazz fans in the 1940s. Literary critic Anatole Broyard's June 1948 Partisan Review essay "A Portrait of the Hipster" is one of the earliest serious attempts to describe the type, and the word drifted through mid-century writing about Beats and jazz scenes before Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book The Tipping Point picked it up as marketing shorthand for young, influential consumers[8]. Three years later, the FreeWilliamsburg blog crew released The Hipster Handbook, a satirical field guide to twenty-somethings in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that turned the label into a punchline for a specific neighborhood. By the early 1990s the Los Angeles Times was already using "hipster" casually to describe the "long-haired rock-and-club crowd" eating breakfast at 2 p.m. at Swingers coffee shop in Los Angeles[1]. Chicago newspapers picked up the same shorthand around the same time, referring to a "goateed hipster in Wicker Park's Double Door club" in a 1994 profile of local musician Wesley Willis[2]. - **Platform:** LiveJournal / Tumblr (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2003 ## Overview The Hipster stereotype is mostly a visual and behavioral shorthand rather than a single image or video: thick-framed glasses, thrifted flannel, ironic mustaches, cans of PBR, single-speed bikes, and coffee shops with exposed brick and reclaimed wood. Online, the joke almost always aims at the gap between how a hipster wants to be seen (independent, ahead of the curve) and how outsiders read them (mainstream cosplayers who all shop the same three Brooklyn blocks)[5]. The format is old enough that it splits into eras. Early 2000s blogs like The Hipster Handbook played it mostly as ethnography, cataloguing slang and dress codes. By the late 2000s the tone hardened into pure mockery, with Tumblr accounts like Unhappy Hipsters pairing sparse design-magazine photography with captions about melancholy loft dwellers[7], and Stuff Hipsters Hate turning a Brooklyn friend group's inside jokes into a book deal[6]. What ties every era together is a fixation on ironic consumption: the idea that the marketing wrapped around a product matters more to the wearer than the product itself[5]. ## How It Spread LiveJournal was the first real hipster clubhouse online. HipsterBookClub launched in October 2003 as a book-swap community, Hipster Review followed in August 2004 as an album blog "by hipsters, for hipsters," and Hipster Scouts arrived in February 2005, while the earliest anti-hipster LiveJournal community, Kill All Hipsters, went up in October 2004 and set the template for the mocking wave that came after[8]. By the late 2000s, hipster-hate had spilled onto Tumblr and Facebook. Andi Zeisler and Brenna Ehrlich's Stuff Hipsters Hate started as a blog cataloguing the small annoyances of Brooklyn creative-class life, growing into a book deal that later let its authors write novels set in Bushwick lofts[6]. Unhappy Hipsters, launched around the same time, undercut the aspirational imagery of design magazine Dwell with captions about loneliness and existential dread[7]. Mainstream press kept picking at the same thread. The Chicago Tribune had already flagged Wicker Park as a hipster-adjacent scene by 1995[2], the New York Times used "hipster" in a review of Charles Bukowski's novel Hollywood[3], and Rolling Stone's 1998 review of Liz Phair's Whitechocolatespaceegg took aim at "indie rockers... beefing up their sound with gratuitous electronic gadgetry," the exact aesthetic the hipster label was built to mock[4]. ## How to Use The Hipster label is usually deployed as an insult or a self-deprecating brag. A common convention is to pair it with a specific consumption habit that "used to be" cool: drinking PBR before it was ironic, listening to a band before they signed, moving to a neighborhood before it was expensive[5]. Image jokes typically stack visual markers like thick-framed glasses, a beanie in warm weather, tattoos, thrifted flannel, a fixed-gear bike, and an expensive pour-over coffee, often with a caption calling out the wearer's studied nonconformity. Self-identification is a paradox baked into the format: the running joke is that a "real" hipster would never admit to being one. ## Cultural Impact Hipster criticism bled into wider writing about gentrification, urban politics, and consumer culture. The Wicker Park scene the Chicago Tribune covered in the mid-1990s later became a shorthand for how "hipster" neighborhoods reshape rent and demographics[2]. Musicians like Liz Phair, whose 1998 Rolling Stone review of Whitechocolatespaceegg needled indie rockers relying on "gratuitous electronic gadgetry," worked directly against the aesthetic checklists critics used to sort insiders from posers[4]. Even Charles Bukowski got dragged in: an archived New York Times review of his novel Hollywood described his boozy alter ego as "the hipster's mask for his softness," the pose of a writer pretending to be a barfly[3]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Hipster? Hipster is a stereotype label for young urbanites who signal alternative taste through indie music, thrift-store fashion, and studied rejection of mainstream culture[5]. ### Where did Hipster come from? The word first attached to 1940s jazz culture and got its modern Brooklyn-adjacent meaning in the early 2000s. Early 1990s American newspapers were already using it as shorthand for the indie coffee-shop crowd[1]. ### What does Hipster mean? The term describes someone who signals independence through niche consumption, while critics argue that the pose itself is a kind of conformity[5]. ### How do you use Hipster? It's usually used as a pejorative or an ironic self-label, paired with visual markers like thrifted flannel, thick-framed glasses, and expensive coffee[5]. ### Is Hipster still popular? The peak of hipster-bashing was around 2009 to 2013 and the label has faded from constant use, though it still turns up in writing about gentrification and indie culture[2]. ### Where did the 1990s hipster scene center? In Brooklyn, especially Williamsburg, and in Chicago's Wicker Park, where clubs like the Double Door drew early hipster crowds by the mid-1990s[2]. ### What is Unhappy Hipsters? A Tumblr blog that added melancholy captions to photos from Dwell design magazine, turning aspirational modernist interiors into scenes of quiet dread[7]. ### What is Stuff Hipsters Hate? A late-2000s blog by Andi Zeisler and Brenna Ehrlich that catalogued the annoyances of Brooklyn creative-class life and grew into a book[6]. ### How does Urban Dictionary define a hipster? One Urban Dictionary entry calls a hipster "a middleclass or rich kid who dresses like a hobo" while claiming to reject the mainstream[5]. ### Did Americans actually dislike hipsters? A May 2013 Public Policy Polling survey found that 42% of Americans disapproved of the subculture, 46% called it "soulless," and 27% thought hipsters should pay an "annoying" tax[8]. ## References 1. [https://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/entertainment/ca-30041_1_hipster-coffee]() 2. [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-01-19-9501190057-story.html]() 3. [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/26/specials/bukowski-hollywood.html]() 4. [https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/whitechocolatespaceegg-252596/]() 5. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hipster]() 6. [https://stuffhipstershate.tumblr.com/]() 7. [https://unhappyhipsters.com]() 8. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hipster]() 9. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAO4EVMlpwM]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/hipster Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library