Adbusters, the journal of the anti-consumerist movement, has been a bit down in the dumps in recent years. A strained voice in the wilderness calling for situationist-style actions, hoping to change the world with “subvertisements”, its beloved global justice movement has dissipated to the four winds. And now a scapegoat has been found for its demise: hipsters... A hipster is young, fashionable, takes a surface interest in any number of fleetingly popular subcultures, objects or media — from an African dance music genre to fixed-gear bikes — and then hastily moves on to “the new thing” before the masses have a chance to catch up...

The central accusation [is] that hipsters are devoid of integrity: that they never truly engage with any of the cultural trends they pay lip-service to, that they’re an advertising demographic rather than a “movement”, and that they are glibly ironic about everything. But really they’re just fashion people, and it seems churlish to attack them just for behaving like fashion people always have done. Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of international hipster bible Vice magazine, wasn’t shy of telling Adbusters to lighten up: “I’ve always found that word (‘hipster’) is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable.”

Vice can sometimes sail dangerously close to parody, but it also exposes the myth that hipsters are necessarily shallow dilettantes... And when specific subcultures are cherry-picked for a season of hipster co-option, it rarely does them serious damage. The hipster eye will quickly turn to something new, shoulders are shrugged, and the artists or musicians or film-makers carry on doing what they were doing in the first place. “Hipsters” are just fashion people being fashion people, and perhaps the magazine of the global justice movement ought to look a little closer to home to explain the demise of its counterculture.

... contd.