Illustration © {link:http://www.katylouisejones.com}Katy Jones{/link}

My flatmate, Becca, said to me this morning, “I went to a hipster party last night. It looked like Cariboo sponsored the event.”

I nodded knowingly.

“Oh, yeah, I was at this hipster party a couple weekends ago. Everyone had tattoos of owls.”

In order to parse this conversation, you kind of have to be a hipster. It takes one to know one, as Becca said later on. Cariboo is a Canadian microbrewery based in Prince George, British Columbia; their hipster cred comes from the fact that their operation is small, their product is cheap, and for every case you buy, Cariboo will plant a tree. As for the owls…I’m mystified when hipsters get tattoos en masse of sardonic symbolism. How do they all know what is going to be trendy and meaningless all at the same time?

I am interested in the connections between hipsters and luxury-goods marketing because hipsters appear to be nothing if not willing to spend on quality merchandise. Though their tastes run peripatetically between newly-discovered-unknown-things and newer-newly-discovered-unknown-things, there is a certain kind of well-established hipster whose bicycle is racing-quality, whose wine, food, and craft-beer knowledge is acute, and whose clothes — although they look like they are from the Salvation Army — are gorgeous and made of the best quality fabrics. There is a market for luxury goods in hipsters, and this is because hipsters identify with the inherent exclusivity of expensive and high-quality things.

But didn’t I just say hipsters all drink cheap beer? Well, yes. My thesis, if you will, is that hipsters follow what literary scholar Richard C. Sha calls “perverse aesthetics” by treating utilitarian goods as so much fashionable ephemera. For some reason, this enrages the contemporary media. Yet aesthetic theory has long supported the idea that works of art should avoid function; in his book Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832 Sha explains that, during the eighteenth-century, “as life became understood in terms of purposiveness [doing things as a means to an end] aesthetics consolidated itself around a resistance to function and to self-interest. Because purpose, function, and self-interest threatened to reduce art to determinism, [or] mere bodily appetite…aesthetics… positioned itself against function.” 1 Can hipster aestheticization of useful commodities like clothing, bicycles and beverages be seen as a form of perverse aesthetics?

The Hipster Ariel meme.

Typically, luxury goods markets and the fashion industry have privileged functionlessness. What are the highest forms of fashion? The avant-garde, the haut-couture, the delicate and the high-maintenance: essentially, the useless. So instead of uselessly consuming the useless, as the readers of Vogue are wont to do, the readers of Vice consume — still uselessly — the useful. Hipsters pervert the traditional functionlessness of aesthetic objects by taking up, as fashionable, clothing that has as its only redeeming quality function (Carharts, Doc Martins, flannel, etc), or by drinking cheap beer that focuses on results (getting you drunk) rather than taste, or by actively sweating in order to get where they are going on fixed-gear bikes. Or finally, the example of aesthetic functionlessness par excellence: thick-rimmed nerd glasses with no glass in them. All this appears to constitute the kind of perversion that makes the non-hipster media not only uncomfortable but angry.

There is a lot of anti-hipster sentiment going around. Christian Lorentzen, in the 2007 Time Out New York article “Why the Hipster Must Die,” calls hipsters “zombies…the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers.”. Douglas Haddow, in his 2008 article “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization,” writes, “Hipsterdom is the first ‘counterculture’ to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation….Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group — using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion.” But Mark Greif, in a 2010 New York Magazine article entitled “What Was The Hipster?“ provides, I think, the best and most illuminating definition.

The hipster, for Greif, is a social phenomenon that began promptly in 1999. As Greif explains, the hipster evolved out of nineties alternative or indie youth-culture, to become a new subcultural figure…that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual — the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twenty-something, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two (emphasis mine).

Where pre-1999 youth culture rejected consumerism, rejected hegemonic class structures, and rejected aesthetic snobbery, the hipster, argues Greif, turns out to be a peculiarly finicky consumer, an underhanded participant in dominant ideologies, and as such is particularly invested in aesthetic exclusivity, or what Greif calls the “hipper than thou” attitude.

Together, these characteristics lead Greif to conclude that the hipster needs to be woken up to the fact that his principles are politically unproductive, elitist and self-indulgent. “Hipster approval of locavore food,” for example, “(because local cheeses and grass-fed beef are expensive, rare, and knowledge-intensive) brings elitism to the left-environmentalist campaign for de-industrialized agriculture” , thereby diluting and reifying legitimate and pressing concerns. Once hipsters have exhausted a certain underground movement’s exclusivity, they move on to lesser-known fare.

So hipsters, like most human beings, are consumers. That is not their crime. The problem that Lorentzen, Haddow, and Greif have with hipsters is that hipsters purport to be countercultural — that is, hipsters co-opt movements such as environmentalism, veganism or vegetarianism, anti-establishmentarianism, pacifism and anti-consumerism, among others — all the while buying into the dominant culture and mass markets. Thus, hipsters trade ideas of functionality (movements, agendas, manifestos), for functionlessness (aesthetically-pleasing eco-clothing, foodie culture, and rampant apathy).

Which is why hipsters do not identify as hipsters — as seen in multiple parodies where a hipster refuses to acknowledge a) that they are indeed a hipster and b) that it is possible to define a hipster. Because if hipsters followed their principles, then hipsterdom would be like a tiny self-destructive kernel of vegan popcorn. Instead, hipster communities span the globe. When I lived in New Zealand in 2006, hipsters were referred to as “boy racers” as they cruised in re-vamped Buicks and ancient Lasers, and Greif makes note of young, hipster-centric cities from Berlin to Portland. The growth of hipster culture, however, comes at the expense of exclusivity and authenticity. Since hipsters don’t stand for anything (no politics, no principles, no morals) and their entire agenda is based on exclusivity and authenticity, one would think this would spell the end for them. And here we return to my initial point about luxury goods markets: because hipsters don’t stand for anything, they will happily submit to stratification along economic lines. There is a niche in expensive, exclusive home design (see Unhappy Hipsters), for example, that has interesting repercussions for the aging hipster (now that the movement is over a decade old).

Though, I’m apt to be forgiving. As Sha attests, “[a]esthetics…has often been another name for perversion,” and I cannot help but wonder if hipsters might be seeking through aesthetics that same condition as Kant: freedom. Do hipsters desire, unbeknownst even to themselves, freedom from the burden of social function? Is the hipster’s interest in twee music, art parties, home-made jewelry, and DIY haute cuisine really just a stab at self-sufficiency? Perhaps hipsters are reacting to the fact that there are too many movements, agendas, manifestos in the world, and it is impossible to live without feeling guilty of shirking at least one of them. The hipster’s (postmodern, fragmented) answer? Participate in all of them, for a couple months. Is this freedom? Well, it’s certainly not commitment.

1 Perversity, for Sha, constitutes a historically-situated idea of purposelessness that is celebrated in Kantian aesthetics and decried in biological functionalism during the Romantic period. Sha’s book focuses on questions of sexuality in Romantic-era Britain; asking whether, in a time when having sex without the intention of reproduction was seen as a kind of perversity—because the act lacks purpose—could it also have been revalued through aesthetics that privileges functionlessness as a means for achieving freedom?

Carmen Faye Mathes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of British Columbia, whose focus is on Romantic poetry and aesthetic attention. Carmen’s blog, The Academic Romantic, is a rich resource featuring essays, book reviews, and interviews with contemporary Canadian poets.