Stuff Hipsters Hate (9 page)

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Authors: Brenna Ehrlich,Andrea Bartz

BOOK: Stuff Hipsters Hate
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BOXERS
 
“How the hell do dudes get their pants on over those? Oh. They’re wearing boot-cut jeans. Or cargo shorts. Yeah.”
 
—Ronald K., 30, freelance animator
 
WEARING SOCKS WITH SNEAKERS
 
Doesn’t matter that your shoes will end up smelling like the inside of a frat boy’s dorm room trash bin one week after purchasing the suckers—you should never wear socks under your footwear of choice. Hipsters wear their blisters like a badge of fucking honor, their fallen arches a testament to their rejection of mainstream, sock-wearing society. If a hipster ever deigned to enter a nail salon, we would pity the poor woman charged with executing a pedicure on those mangled and marinated toes.
 
WELL-WORN BASEBALL CAPS
 
You know how you used to break in the bill of a new baseball cap when you were a kid? Lovingly folding the bill and carefully shaping it into a pristine arc? Well, if you want to roll with the hipster crowd, we would suggest you cease and desist with the customization process. Keep the bill straight and set your cap at a jaunty angle and you’ll avoid Bro Gap and plummet right into Hipster Douche Cavern.
 
BRAS
 
Hipster girls hate wearing them and hipster boys hate when girls wear them. When you’re so emaciated that your chest resembles that of a virginal ten-year-old, a bra is just one more piece of expensive fabric that you have to wash and one more article of clothing a hipster dude has to peel off when you’re both drunk and skinny-dipping in your heiress BFF’s rooftop pool.
 
CONVERSE
 
Now, we can already hear the protestations, the torches and pitchforks and cries that we’ve got it wrong. After all, Converse are one of the most cited hallmarks of the indie set. But after months of extensive immersion research, we are forced to conclude that authentic, through-and-through hipsters hate the ol’ All Stars. In major urban areas that double as hipster enclaves, Chucks can now be seen gracing the feet of greasy teenagers, plump, bespectacled 30-year-old women and middle-aged dudes riding the subway to Queens. Hipsters know no loyalty—though Converse have long been beloved by the clique, the trendsetters barely thought twice about kicking their beat-up kicks to the curb the second they noticed white stars gracing the feet of the common man.
 
Now, they’ve traded up to equally ratty Keds and Vans (each pair of which, incidentally, they’ve also “totally had since, like, high school”). To be sure, the childlike footwear will soon spread like wildfire among everyday losers, hot on Chuck Taylors’ holey heels, and hipsters will co-opt their next shoe du jour—work boots, maybe, or hip-hop kids’ puffy white sneakers. Or mayhaps the hepcats will circle back to the tan Skechers they wore in seventh-grade—exact replicas of the skater shoes that were stolen from the locker room during gym class. Oh shit, Skechers with JNCOs, baby Ts and Y-necklaces as the next It outfit—just call us Nostradamus.
 
CHAPTER 4
 
GROOMING
 
 
[CASE STUDY]
 
Jaime K. looks like your average 25-year-old hipster girl: tangled hair, sleepy eyes, pale skin, rumpled clothing. She rarely wears makeup or perfume, and though she showers on a regular basis, she only washes her long, curly hair every week or so. However, Jaime did not always comport herself as such. Jaime attended school in the Midwest, where she would straighten her hair daily and apply bright polish to her shapely nails—in fact, she rarely went out of the house sans a coat of foundation and full face of makeup. She and her friends would frequent local sports bars, where bros would approach her, drawn to her glossy locks and lips. However, Jaime was never attracted to men of this nature, and they were often repelled by her obscure taste in literature and strong opinions about green living. Once, a more freewheeling friend took her to a bar in one of the city’s rare pockets of hipsterdom, but the hipster boys there gave her nary a glance, put off by her blush-tinted cheeks and sparkly clutch purse.
 
 
 
Upon moving to Bushwick (the only neighborhood she could afford thanks to her job doing marketing for an Internet start-up), Jaime grew tired of the daily preparations of a “proper lady,” which began to feel akin to a virgin cleansing and anointing herself in anticipation of a sacrifice. She retired her straightener, letting her hair return to its natural state, and applied a swipe less makeup every day. A very curious thing happened: Hipster boys began to give her sly glances as she scribbled poetry in her Moleskine at the local coffee shop, and even jangled up to her at her friends’ loft parties. Now, Brooklyn locals consider Jaime “sexy.” Why? Because she always appears to have just:
 
 
a) come home from a trip abroad where acid was in high supply;
 
 
b) finished an artistic endeavor of great import; and/or
 
 
c) engaged in all-night, coked-out sex with one to three partners.
 
 
The idea of embracing practiced disarray is nothing new—fashion magazines have been teaching sexually ambitious tweens to perfect “bed head” for years now, devoting entire spreads to the tousled strands on sleepy-looking models who rub their smoky eyes and/or stretch their sticklike limbs. Hipsters merely take this concept to the extreme, embracing unironed clothing, the natural blemishes and scars of an unadorned face, and the dark eye bags most often seen on claymation characters in Tim Burton films. While hipster fashion is flashy, intricate and attention-grabbing (see Chapter 3), hipsters’ grooming rituals take the opposite tack, bordering on nonexistence. As always, outsiders wonder, why the tendency to shun society’s standards of beauty? Simple: Because showing that you think about your appearance indicates that you care what those around you think, and hipsters are not having that.
 
Let us examine each gender independently, starting with the males of the species. Although regular folks may call hipster males “womanly” or “fey” for wearing “their girlfriends’ jeans” and occasionally making out with their male roommates, when it comes to grooming, hipster males are far from metrosexual. While males of other leanings take great pains to keep their hair combed and in perfect order, remove unsightly stubble and smell like the inside of a swanky men’s fashion magazine, the hipster man is constantly striving to achieve a level of mountain man-esque masculinity: favoring more undone hair styles, allowing his face to darken with a bristly carpet
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and shunning any bottled pheromones in favor of his own signature smell—grass, sweat and cigarette smoke. Such is the aesthetic favored by men whom the hipster considers “authentic,” e.g., drunken authors, janitors and railroad hobos.
 
By embracing such personas, the hipster male is, in a sense, enacting a kind of rebellion. In most cases, these men grew up privy to a rather privileged existence, never once coming into contact with people like truck drivers, lumberjacks or dock workers. Pre-hipsters were taught to tie their ties before performing with their high school jazz band, to brush their teeth nightly and to keep their hair short and neat. Once they were loosed into the “real” world, where they soon were saddled with service industry jobs and bleak living arrangements, the romance of squalor became more and more appealing. And so they strove to assimilate into the grimy luster of poverty (one fostered by listening to too much Johnny Cash and Neil Young), telling the world that they don’t truck with putting on airs. This is how hipster males reclaim their lost masculinity: through five o’clock shadows and scars gleaned from drunken walks home down the back alleys of their youth.
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Now let us turn our attention to the hipster female. The reasons for her abandonment of societal norms are rather straightforward. What is a woman taught from Day One? To be charming, lovely, sweet-smelling, graceful and always put together. Since a hipster, by nature, rejects everything that mainstream society elevates, it follows that the hipster female casts off all aspects of femininity that her mother and sisters hold dear. That includes makeup, artificially straightened hair, supportive undergarments and anything else that gives the impression that she is endeavoring to look attractive in the conventional sense.
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This divestment of niceties serves dual purposes:
1. The hipster female is demonstrating to the hipster male that she does not, in fact, care what he thinks of her. Therefore, she assumes a kind of power over him (see Chapter 1). Although one would think that meeting a possible sex partner in a state of general
disarray would be off-putting, the hipster male is intrigued. The girl suddenly becomes “real,” an attribute highly esteemed in the hipster world.
 
2. By rejecting the traditional feminine attributes—cupid’s bow lips, the soft scent of jasmine and shapely leg encased in a haze of nylon—the hipster female embraces her sexuality in a way that borders on masculinity. She revels in her tangled hair, her punched-in eyes and her own natural fragrance. Forget “I feel pretty,” a hipster female only strives to feel “powerful.”
 
 

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