The hipster of your dad’s imagination downed his last small batch IPA many moons ago.Yes, there was once a period when fashionable young people rode fixies and got fingerstache tattoos; when they wore non-prescription glasses and actively chose to drink out of old jam jars. But that period was 2007. By the time late-night hosts were monologuing about flat whites (a style of coffee available at Starbucks since 2009), it was no longer considered pretentious to “have facial hair”.
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Somewhere in the early 2010s, the high street coopted anything viewed as remotely alt, internet memes coopted irony, and American dubstep fans coopted fluorescent sunglasses. Yet, for some reason, the mental image of a hipster holds as “someone in a plaid shirt sneering about your taste in music”.Hipsters do still exist, of course – young, cool, in-the-know types are still wearing weird shit, still listening to weird music, still displacing long-term residents of rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods – but the definition has broadened and blurred, and nobody calls them hipsters anymore*.Mind you, what happened 15 years ago has happened again: in a bid to be anything but normie, young people adopt certain styles and behaviours, this adoption reaches critical mass, and recognisable “Hipster Basic” signifiers start to emerge. Out with the skinny jeans, in with those cargo pants that imply you’re hugely into urban fishing.The hipsters of 2023 might be less judgmental than they once were, but in ye olde hipster fashion, here’s a judgmental rundown of just a few of the things that make you Hipster Basic.*I realise this article literally has “hipster” in the headline, but none of the new terms we conjured up to classify these people – alties, antinorms, copsters – are as neat as hipster. (“Nipsters” – for new hipsters – wasn’t terrible, but the Nazis already got that.)
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Jorts (in the summer)
Insanely baggy pants (in the winter)
Techy Y2K sunglasses
Natty wine
Performatively shitting on Fred Again
Shrooms (specifically polkadots or mushroom oil tinctures)
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Tooth gems
Maxi skirts with baby tees (preferably a child-sized Brasil t-shirt)
Spiky alien tentacle tattoos
The ‘blokecore’ aesthetic
Bleached eyebrows
The mullet 3.0
Being ‘Bristol sober’ (only doing ketamine)
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Salomons
Following hyper-local meme accounts
Long-sleeved shrugs
2CB
Loafers with schoolgirl socks (on men)
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Dyed red hair
A MUBI subscription
Going to harsh noise shows
Men’s sports bras and crop tops
Martine Rose x Nike shox, or Asics x Kiko Kostadinov
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