The only confirmed hipster piece of clothing is the finger moustache tattooo, everything else is am accoutrement

I still don’t know wtf hipsters are lol

I still don’t really know what hipster fashion is supposed to be. Most of it just looks pretty normal or leaning on other aesthetics. I don’t see these clear identifying elements that other subcultures often have.

I remember hipsters dressing like lumberjacks and 1920s flappers, more than farmers.

I associate the peak of hipster culture with people opening up boutique cocktail bars with cutesy themes, trying to turn arts and crafts and manual labor into a profit, when the post-2008-crash economy meant jobs were scarce and retail rents were cheap. It was a rebellion against the housing and finance based economy, but not against capitalism as a whole.

People hated hipsters because they were a bunch of fresh out of college kids dressing weird and “refusing” to get a normal job (because the economy was fucked). Also because a lot of them were gay. Also because those hipster bars were a huge gentrification vector.

I can’t be as sure about cottagecore, because it’s still happening, and I’m less in the thick of it. It is also an arts and crafts movement. But it mostly exists in pinterest mood boards, because it doesn’t have a weird economic moment thrusting it into reality (except all the farmers markets in my area doubled in size this year for some reason, what the fuck is that, and is it cottagecore?).

I don’t think hipster fashion can be reduced to farm aesthetic from the 1940s or any other period.

People have different reasons to rag on hipsters depending on their own politics, but the universal critique relates to the hollowness and hypocrisy of the trend. From the Marxist perspective it’s pretty clearly a shout into the void, a search for meaning in a capitalism devoid of meaning, which I sympathize with. But that’s precisely the thing about the hipster movement: it rebels by doubling down on the forces ostensibly critiqued by it.

Hipsters want authenticity. From an upper-middle-class, usually white perspective, they peer into perceived “authentic” cultures often of POC and global south. This is coupled with an increase in ✨wanderlust✨, white bougie people traveling to SE Asia or Latin America with a knapsack and a trust fund, with a plan to beg their way through their travels or work an odd job if they must. Back home in the suburbs and cities, they wear choice items that seem to embody the genuine culture of elsewhere. Obviously this is a cynical and materialistic way of obtaining authenticity. Aesthetic over substance, form over function. But that’s the logic of capitalism: culture is itself commodified. Rather than culture being the totality of one’s social existence, it can be congealed into aesthetic, into clothing and vintage record players.

Individualism is another key ethic of hipsterism. The struggle for authenticity immediately confronts a contradiction with privilege. Western individualism is essentially the reflection of privilege, because as a white wealthy person, you must believe in your own difference from the masses, your uniqueness that explains your privilege. But you cannot obtain the authenticity of common folk while refusing to drop privilege and superiority. Hence another layer of hypocrisy. Culture can not only be commodified, it can be worn and removed as necessary, as one would a hat, as the situation demands.

Again, I sympathize with the search for meaning. But meaning is to be found in real existence, not in materialistic consumption, nor in aesthetic.

cottage core is more sinister

I think the core has something to do with the fact that it was perceived as people who had grown up with technology and computers seeking a non-technological, non digital aesthetic. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think that explains the impulse to make fun of it, because it read to many as cringe in an insincere or idealistic way.

I also think it explains the appeal: many guys my age (self very included) still seek out that non digital aesthetic, whether because we’ve come to associate tech aesthetics with capitalism or if it’s just a generic repulsion from what feels like the mainstream in our society that is currently being run by tech billionaires.

The impulse to make fun of it has faded out too, along with the growing mainstream appeal of being anti-tech in the current AI bubble gig app dominated spying on kindergartners in the pool with security cameras economy. See: hatred of datacenters.

No

It’s the constant desire to have an outgroup to chastise

I recall the term “lumbersexual” being used for a few months during the heights of that trend arc. I think it may have been sort of lesbian coded at first, and then the “metrosexual” trend sort of consumed it because “new trend”. So I guess a lot of the backlash from certain rural LARPers was that the urban folks were doing their thing but more stylish perhaps.

Idk, I feel like I have a duty to make fun of every artist inspired by the Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.