Friday, August 29, 2008

Has the hipster become pedestrian? Hell yeah!




The Independent(thanks Haute Concept) issued an article addressing the global hipster phenomenom. Basically there were always cities like New York, Tokyo, Paris, London etc. that were considered the cool city of the moment.
There always used to be a particular city that was the centre of cool at a particular point in time,” says Ted Polhemus, style anthropologist and author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. “But now there’s no longer a place where it’s ‘at’; there’s no longer any centre of the world’s popular cultural universe. For a time it seemed it would be a simple matter of shifting from London to Tokyo. But instead, street style is everywhere and in places you’d never have guessed it would be.”

This global hipster is everywhere, wearing similar clothing and listening to the same music, delivering the same ironic humour, leaving one to ask where the individuality and authenticity is.
The word hipster can even be viewed as an insult to some.
Thanks to the internet, trends can reach a global audience faster than ever. But is this giving us more popular cultural freedom or making us all look, walk, talk, act, think the same? What do you think?

Photos courtesy of Tanisthenewgray blog, Garance Dore and Cobrasnake

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