The Metropolis

If you want to talk meaningfully about London life, the hipsters have to die

Mike Pollitt | Wednesday 19 December, 2012 11:19

“On-trend Generation Ys will love the sprawling loft apartment refurbs, while Archway market is a hub for hipsters at the weekend, with a mix of fashion and organic food.”

There are many things wrong with this sentence from an Evening Standard piece touting London’s up and coming neighbourhoods.

But I want to train my fire on only one part of the monster.

For here is as a good an opportunity as any to demand that we kill the hipster as a character in any genuine conversation about Londoners, where they live and what they do.

People need to understand this: there is no such group of people as “hipsters”. Not really.

The word doesn’t describe living, breathing people. It describes an idea of people. Everyone thinks they know who hipsters are. Everyone can point one out in a lol tumblr meme. But it’s a meme without meaning, because the hipsters don’t exist.

Ask someone you know to name a specific hipster of their acquaintance, to physically tell you the first and last name of an actual real hipster, and they will struggle.

Ask them if they themselves might be a hipster, and they’ll deny it outright.

Hipsters are always other people; strangers abstracted. When they appear as the subject of a sentence, the real world departs.

So when someone you know starts talking about “hipsters”, remember that they’re talking about fictional characters. And paper-thin characters at that.

If you want to say something funny, cutting or dismissive about people who you think look really cool/like complete twats, then hipster is still as good a word as any.

If you want to say something insightful about the actually existing world, then the hipsters have to die.

---