Last night, I had a great time hanging out in the infamous Hipsters Central of Brooklyn also known (for administrative purposes anyways) as Williamsburg. Everyone else prefers to use the less neutral appellations of doucheoisie quarters, fauxhemian section or the likes. --You may even have your own hilarious designations to share with us in the comments box.
Not so long ago, living on the Morgan avenue stop of the New York City Transit's L line, I had daily access to the pool of counter-mass-culture-minded crowd populating the few couple of stops before hitting Manhattan. One could say that boarding the subway was equivalent to sitting on the first row of some of the most creative, quirky, unpretentious, spontaneous anti-establishment fashion shows.
As a then twenty something transplant ingénue, who identified clothing through brand names and the chain stores that carried them only, I would get quite a kick out of observing the crowd of creatively decked out and carefree cool urban gypsies.
These guys were unlike most young people I knew. They didn’t care about sporting the neatest pair of kicks, they didn’t seem to mind wearing stuff with no ostensible brand name stitched across it. Let’s not even mention ironing their jeans or anything. Hell, these guys probably even shopped for clothes in thrift stores and wore them right at the register too! -Yeah, back then in my world, the whole thrift store thing was this big no-no! Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I liked these kids’ sense of style which didn’t seem to follow any “self-conscious” rules usually dictated by the runways and the billboards. Same stuff dumped to the streets, accepted and unquestioned by the masses.
Those boarding at the Bedford Avenue stop of the L train weren’t total radicals or wannabe staunch fashion anarchists either. They were hip and subsequently honed the “hipster” term. They certainly weren’t the pack of obvious trend-followers the term would have you think. Not then.
Something must have happened since that time (less than a decade ago). Because now, the hipster has become a branding in itself, and as such it has turned into one of the funniest target for mockery and joke the blogosphere over. Not just on blogs or NY Times articles, would you find pieces to standardize the fauhemians. Catch them in real life and they seem to have been caught up by the very conformism from which they once were fast running away. Yes, I’m saying the vintage-clad, roaming hearts and minds, now have chain boutiques to pick ridiculously priced wrinkled and “homeless layered” type of items from; the most recognizable of them all being what some have called the glorified clothing landfill: Urban Outfitters.
Talk about pretense and conforming in the same way American Eagle khaki pants-wearing drones are. Yesterday, sitting at Fada, a French bistrot on the corner of Driggs ave. and North 6, the thirty something amused transplant that I am couldn’t help but see in the Williamsburg hipsters cohort, a bunch of total posers! Must be the cred I gained from only being able to afford buying almost everything I own in Goodwill stores…
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