The Commercialization of Hipster

What is a hipster? Any good research piece on the topic of hipsterism would begin with a good, solid definition, and I of all people should be able to provide that: I can’t count the number of times I’ve thrown on an outfit, shared an opinion or otherwise shown interest in an area of culture only to be told, “Julia, you’re such a hipster.” I blush and wonder why a sincere display of personal expression should garner that response. In any case, I immediately defend myself, because that's what such an accusation calls for: “No, I’m not!”

The average person would know a hipster when they see one. If asked, they’d be quick to write said hipster off as an aesthetic junkie: a self-absorbed, pretentious artsy type, competitively trendy and yet fiercely judgemental of mainstream trend-followers. “Hipster” has come to be a dirty word, an insult, often used by (perhaps culturally-insecure) individuals to describe those who act culturally-superior. The term itself is incredibly broad, which we can see in the various common stereotypes: hipsters can be appearance-obsessed twentysomethings who will stare at you in disdain through the lenses of their nonprescription oversized 80’s glasses and attend trendy parties and afterparties and after-afterparties; hipsters can be Smart car-driving, beard-sporting environmentalists who quit their jobs to start eco-friendly locally-crafted artisanal microbrewed apple beer companies – whatever that means. Hipsters themselves will reject the label, naturally, and criticize other hipsters: Douglas Haddow of Adbusters – a countercultural, supremely hipstery magazine – calls the hipster “the dead end of Western Civilization” and an “aesthetic vacuum, stripped of its subversion and originality.” Ouch. And yet, these words ring vaguely hollow from the magazine that banned customers from buying subscriptions on Black Friday in order to encourage a 24-hour shopping boycott – an undeniably hipster move. It’s clear: hipsters are hated by nearly everyone, including each other.

Nobody wants to be called a hipster. And certainly few people would be willing to look past the endless negative connotations and stereotypes surrounding hipsters and accept them for what they are: the innovators and tastemakers of our culture.

Innovators? Tastemakers? Really? What about that guy with the sideburns, fixed gear bike and affinity for cheap beer? Yes, I saw him, and I stand by my point. We can't call all hipsters innovators, but like it or not, there is undeniably a group among them whose fast-changing, obscure tastes determine the onset of trends at the very core of our mainstream culture. We can thank marketing for that: since the term first landed in the hands of the opportunistic New York City marketing exec across the river from Brooklyn, hipster culture and mainstream culture are no longer separate entities. So sorry hipsters, but your refusal of things that are “too mainstream” is a fruitless act because everything you do will turn mainstream, eventually. And sorry to all you hipster haters, but that new trend you’ve (finally) caught onto is indirectly brought to you by yours truly, Hipster Julia.

The general consensus about modern hipsterism is that it started in 1999: when early millennials first began their coming of age and soul-searching quests, when American Apparel opened for business and Vice Magazine moved from Montreal to New York City. The term “hipster” itself dates back to the 1940s, describing young white middle-class folks who fetishized the lifestyles of the black jazz musicians they followed, contrarily to modern hipsters, who originally were doing the same to the white working class American lifestyle. I would argue that the hipster existed in many forms between the 1940s and 1999: the beatnik, the hippie, the punk, the grunger. We tend to romanticize past subcultures and give them more credit than our current ones, but I can’t help believing that all these countercultural identities were all similarly self-obsessed and aesthetically indulgent. The big things that distinguish modern middle-class hipsters from the privileged baby boomer hippies of the 60’s, among other past subcultures, are social media and the omnipresent world of marketing. As Adbusters’ Haddow accurately points out, hipster counterculture is “the first to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations.” This would explain why the hipster is so hard to define: he or she has been in an ongoing identity crisis since 1999.

Of course, this makes them a powerful tool in the world of marketing. As hipsters search for authenticity, those “continually shifting” interests establish new trends regularly and publicly, easing the lives of marketing specialists who now have significantly less work to do. Hipsters have the power to pick out new trends that will potentially catch the eyes of consumers who are desensitized to used-and-reused marketing techniques; consumers who, despite themselves, still strive for coolness. By successfully targeting the small, social media-savvy hipster demographic, marketers and brands can count on their products spreading naturally within mainstream culture as average consumers (including hipster haters) try to emulate coolness. Before you know it, the five-dollar knit pullover sweater originally purchased by a hipster at a Brooklyn thrift shop is all sold out at Urban Outfitters and Forever 21, or, alternatively, at Ralph Lauren – this process seems to exist within higher and lower class consumer demographics.

Hipsters and marketers rely on each other heavily: if not for marketers, hipsters would have no reason to strive for individuality away from the mainstream, thereby halting the evolution of their subculture. If not for hipsters, marketers would have nowhere to draw new trends from. So instead of chasing their own tails trying to get trends out into the public eye, marketers follow hipsters in their fast-paced cycle of embrace-trend, reject-trend, repeat. Sometimes, the marketers are the hipsters themselves.

Mark Greif, a New York English professor and a chief editor of the n+1 essay collection “What Was The Hipster?”, told The Guardian, "What is meaningful about the hipster moment, 1999 and after is that it seems to be an effort to live a life that retains the coolness in believing that you belong to a counter-culture, where the substance of the rebellion has become pro-commerce." He goes on to say that within hipster culture, many people are “actually working in advertising, marketing and product placement. These were once embarrassing jobs. Now it's meaningful in this world to say that you sell sneakers, at a high level." Hipsters make excellent marketing agents, because they know how to reach their own niche audience. Their parties and hot spots are often crawling with inconspicuous “cool hunters” — young, hipster professionals who attend trendy events for a living to collect raw data for marketing companies. By using cool hunters and gathering information from the street level, marketers are able to sell products back with the element of authenticity that spreads like wildfire within hipster culture and that, eventually, seeps into the mainstream. Conversely to past countercultural movements – punk or grunge, for instance, where selling out was the very worst thing one could do – hipsters seem to embrace commercialism. They are fiercely aware of marketing and are loyal to the brands that can successfully extract their most important values and sell them back, at whatever cost.

Authenticity is, inarguably, one of the most important of those values. Pabst Blue Ribbon is a case in point for this. While its trendiness may have faded slightly in recent years, PBR found a home with hipsters in the late 2000s, and managed to do so while employing minimal marketing strategy. In his book Fizz: Harness the Power of Word Of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth, Ted Wright describes how his marketing agency, Fizz, aided in making PBR popular again. He found the beer brand’s niche audience among children of yuppie parents, who, in a form of rebellion “swarmed to things that the mainstream culture deemed hopelessly unhip.” The near-nonexistent budget for the job was a blessing in disguise, Wright says: “The fact that these young people had never seen a PBR ad was a huge selling point for them. It reminded them of a time when men drank beer because they liked to, not because they had been promised a backyard full of bikini models.” The authenticity element has been used again and again by other brands like Levi’s, whose ads utilize the working class, ruggedly-trendy aesthetic that hipsters so embrace. Romantic, retrospective advertising seems to be especially effective: it evokes an image of the simpler “good old days” which hipster millennials were never a part of but are nonetheless nostalgic for in the mass-media mess of the 21st century.

As marketing strategist Bruce Philp points out in his column for Canadian Business “Hipster Marketing 101,” hipsters also value a personal touch in the products they buy. Discussing the hipster gentrification phenomenon known as “Brooklynization,” Philp writes, “There’s no doubt that the people who planted the first seeds of this cultural phenomenon were rejecting something, but it wasn’t consumerism. Far from it.” He goes on, “Consuming is specifically part of the deal, even if it’s only on Etsy. No, what they were rejecting was globalization.” Hipsters want to feel like they are buying close to home. This accounts for the popularity of artisanal selling platforms like Etsy, as well as brands like American Apparel that were founded with anti-sweatshop mission statements. As with all things hipster, though, this close-to-home ethos is popularized, mangled and eventually sold to the mainstream in what Philp calls the “Brooklynization of marketing.” Philp himself says this phenomenon can be “transformationally good for marketing” but I’m not so sure. The results of it include words like “artisan” and “natural” being stuck arbitrarily beside product names (Philp references Tostitos and their new “artisanal” corn chips) and Amazon, a paragon of globalization and the antithesis of “close to home,” trying to tap into Etsy’s artsy niche market with the questionable launch of Amazon Handmade.

Ultimately, hipster is a term that is quickly losing relevance. As Bruce Philp and other strategists would be quick to point out, they remain a positive force within the world of marketing, certainly, but what about outside of that? What about within the sphere of culture? The fact of the matter is that without marketing, hipster culture would cease to be: there would be no reason for hipsters to evolve. It says something unfavourable about our society when the largest countercultural movement of our century is sustained only by partially-self-inflicted exploitation by marketers; when it exists for the sole purpose of being countercultural. I suppose that this is, in fact, the biggest element that separates hipsterism from previous countercultural movements: it lacks purpose. Every counterculture in recent history has ultimately strayed from its founding principles, but hipsters never had any to begin with: there is no common fundamental message concerning peace and love, antiestablishmentarianism, social justice. There is only a fierce, endless rejection of mainstream anything. I’m not going to pull an Adbusters here and dub hipsters “the dead end of Western civilization” and I won’t resort to melodrama with the closing statement that “we have become a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.” On the contrary: I have confidence in the arrival of something new. I eagerly await a subculture to rise from the ashes of hipsterism equipped with a message worth spreading – a message that, hopefully, will not include the phrase, “that’s too mainstream.”

Sources

"Hipster." Urban Dictionary. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

"Hipster (contemporary Subculture)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

These two sites provided a good starting point for my research because they gave an accurate portrait of what the term “hipster” means to most people today. Urban Dictionary helped me to understand the more negative, individualistic perceptions of hipsterism, while Wikipedia outlined the culture as a whole and its evolution since the early 2000s.

"Hipsters: The Marketers Wet Dream?" All Things Independent. Wordpress, 25 July 2015. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

This article gave me a solid foundation for my argument that hipsters are in fact the tastemakers for our mainstream culture. Here the writer outlines the theory of hipsters as innovators and the cycle of hipster tastes eventually making their way to the mainstream. They also outline why hipsters are an audience worth targeting among marketers. Though I did not explicitly reference this article in my essay, it was hugely helpful in that it gave me direction during the initial stages of outlining my piece. I was interested in the points discussed here and wanted to take them a step further.

Philp, Bruce. "Hipster Marketing 101." Canadian Business, Your Source For Business News. Rogers Digital Media, 06 May 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

In this article, Bruce Philp discusses the “Brooklynization” of mainstream marketing. This article was helpful as I attempted to explain what kind of consumerism hipsters embrace, and how average brands can tap into that style of marketing in order to attract a more trendy and influential audience. Reading this gave me additional evidence to support my thesis statement that hipsters are the tastemakers for mainstream culture. It discussed hipster culture from a marketing perspective, which helped me find a balanced voice throughout my essay.

Wright, Ted. "How Pabst Blue Ribbon Earned Its Hipster Cred." Fizz: Harness the Power of Word Of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth. N.p.: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014. N. pag. Print.

I knew that in order to make a point about hipsters’ influence on the world of branding, I would have to find a case example of a brand that found a niche audience in hipsters. Pabst Blue Ribbon was the perfect example. As a brand that became popular with no advertising at all, it perfectly illustrated my point that one of the most important elements for hipsters is authenticity. This article, excerpted from a book, discusses how Pabst made that quick turn-around.

Haddow, Douglas. "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization." Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. Adbusters Magazine, 29 July 2008. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

This article looked at the evolution of hipsters from a cynical, more dramatic perspective. It is written more of a prose style. This was interesting for my research because it enlightened me on some of the less positive opinions on hipsters, which provided balance in my essay. I found that in order to have a well-rounded narrative it was necessary to explain some of the popular negative perceptions and criticisms.

Rayner, Alex. "Why Do People Hate Hipsters?" The Guardian Life and Style. Guardian News and Media Limited, 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

This is a well rounded article that covers different elements of hipster culture. It’s a little bit all over the place but was still helpful. The author begins by discussing the general hate directed at hipsters, then goes on to talk about the evolution of the hipsters and their relationship with marketers. I was particularly interested in the words of Mark Greif, who describes how many hipsters are actually the marketers themselves. This added an interesting angle to my essay and gave support to my points that hipsters actually embrace commercialism.

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