hipster

The current “hipster” probably has nothing to do with the older iteration of “hipster”; it’s just another part of the “retro” trend that they’ve borrowed the old name. Or maybe it was applied to them, by people who remember the negative connotations of the old name; I’m not sure where it came from.

In actuality I think this one is just the revision of the yuppie (young urban professional) of my generation (Gen X), except that a lot of hipsters don’t work in traditional professional jobs because they’re fashionably anti-capitalist. If they work, they’re freelancers. Many are wealthy enough to avoid working anyway — solidly middle/upper-class background with generous parents; a lot of accumulated generational wealth (I knew one who’d had a condo deeded to her as a college graduation gift); a trust fund; whatever, though it’s unfashionable to talk about their wealth so they often plead poverty and move into the poorest neighborhoods to be cool (which usually triggers a wave of gentrification in their wake). Also includes, in New York at least, a lot of trust fund kids from overseas, due to the strength of the Euro, and many of them have been stepping in the deepest piles of racism because they don’t really get the nuances here. (Doesn’t stop them from trying, though.)

But basically, the current hipsters are the liberal twentysomethings of this generation, who are usually ham-handed in their liberalism (they’re anti-capitalist and anti-establishment, yet they don’t understand gentrification or their role in it; those who do understand don’t care), and who are constantly in search of new frontiers of whatever — drugs, real estate, sex, fashion. Otherwise they’re just as superficial and self-absorbed as any other twentysomethings. Usually white, as the yuppies were; I haven’t yet heard any PoC derivatives of yuppie, like buppie. They’re usually careful to include a token BBF or PoC in their circle of friends, though, so that they don’t appear racist. If PoC are lacking, they’ll take gay people.

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