Filed under: On location, Style in the media
If you believe this Christian Lorentzen article in the most recent edition of Time Out NY, hipsters are killing cool. "These hipster zombies -- now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts -- are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn."
Lorentzen's main beef with hipsters seems to be that some of them have jobs and can afford nice apartments in trendy neighborhoods. Yawn. This argument is dragged out every few years when a particular sub-culture gains mainstream popularity, and is no longer isolated to pretentious coffee shop employees and unemployed cultural elitists. The hippies sold out, punk is dead, hipsters have day jobs -- so what?
All of it proves one point: Lorentzen has no idea what cool is, and has become -- more or less -- a grumpy old curmudgeon wistful for his glory days (before these darn kids mucked it all up). There will be another trend, another subculture, another fad, and it will start amongst the broke, starving artists in the sketchiest urban neighborhoods, and hipsters will become a thing of the past. Then those kids will get older, make more money, and they will become mainstream.
Why Time Out is so surprised by this phenomenon, and upset by lawyers trying to be cool, is completely beyond me.
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