Your typical hipster female, enjoying free bottom shelf vodka from 10-11PM.

This raises a very important question, and one that we should most definitely explore. Is the whole hipster thing merely a fashion deal and nothing more? The answer is yes and no. I think we can all agree that the fashion staples of the hipster community, tight jeans, neon, V-neck shirts, fedora hats, fake eyeglasses, converse, keffiyahs, ironic mustaches and/or beards and Venetian blind shades are pretty much omnipresent. The strange thing about this is that most people who adopt a “uniform” style of dress in this manner tend to have a unifying force that brings them together to drink, do drugs, listen to music and have sex with each other. For the hipster, this unifying force is not required, as the sex and drugs is a means to it’s own end. Now you might well ask: “How is this different than it was with kids in the 80s?”

If your answer to this question was, “It’s not”, then you are a hipster.

The answer to this is actually quite simple. In the 1980s, kids were rebelling against Reaganomics, the Cold War, corporate rock, the war on drugs, and their hippy-turn-yuppie parents. The hipster has nothing to rebel against. Most hipsters have parents or boyfriends/girlfriends with real jobs or trust funds that are more than willing to pay their rent because they are “artists” (meaning they project weird jpegs that they found online on the wall while a “DJ” plays songs off his MacBook at some warehouse party once a week). They are happy to settle for creating “awareness” or wearing an Obama T-shirt (printed by Shepard Fairey, of course). Their adoption of 80s fashion and drug culture is a result of watching 90210 reruns in college and maybe reading Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero” on the crapper.


While this may appear to be a gang of homosexual street toughs, they are actually hipsters that pay $1500 a month to live in this crappy neighborhood.

Take a look at the clothes you are wearing right now. How tight are your pants? Can you fit your hand into your pocket without a great deal of struggle? If not, you may be either a woman or a hipster or both. Are you wearing a scarf in the summer? Do the glasses you are wearing have clear plastic lenses or no lenses at all? Do you even need those glasses to read the latest Chuck Palahniuk novel you’ve got there? Are you reading a Chuck Palahniuk novel? Have you ever stopped to wonder when it stopped being funny and/or gross to have a mustache and show off your chest hair? If you are exhibiting any of the symptoms that I have just described, than you, my friend, are a hipster.

If one were to look past the unmotivated fashion and cultural vacancy of the hipster, there are a few key identifiers that may exist beside the obvious. Lets try a few multiple-choice questions:

Question 1: How often do you have your picture taken?

A.) I dunno, every once in awhile, I guess.
B.) Enough to fill up 20 different albums on MySpace.
C.) Enough to fill up 20 different albums on FaceBook (MySpace is so last year).
D.) Enough that if placed end to end, they would make a stop motion movie of my life that lasts several hours.

Fact: Hipsters like having their picture taken. More like they fucking love it. Award yourself zero hipster points for choosing A, one for B, two for C, and three for D.