The Demise of the Subcultural

Identity:
Towards a Postmodern Theory of The Hipster and
Hipster Style
By Alexa Gould-Kavet FdA Fashion Styling & Photography Cultural
Studies
(written in Helvetica, for obvious reasons)

Introduction

To speak of our world as post-modern means, in a consumer context, to

see there is increasing choice and access to commodities to represent both our
individual taste and our social status. The hipsternot referring to a style of
trousers, but rather a contemporary youth culture has come, I will argue, to
exhibit these aspects of post-modernity, and has shown the breakdown of
subculture itself. It is no longer appropriate to label the Hipster a subculture, for
various reasons to ensue. However, we can discuss it as a meta-subculture: a
subculture that constantly appropriates and values obscure, eclectic elements
from all kinds of subcultures as well as out of sync mainstream objects that are
then fetishized and elevated by the hipster taste. To be hipster is to curate ones
tastes to speak a language that communicates irony to other hipsters and
confusion to the outer, mainstream worldthus causing dismissal, disapproval
and criticism from those outside. However, this does not explain why hipsters
themselves hate the word hipster, which has more to do with the paradoxical
nature of the hipster identity.
The hipster, ideally, feels their tastes to be un-self consciously unique,
expressions of their true self, which goes against the mainstream. However,

because this image can and has been repackaged and marketed back to the
hipster demographic as well as those perhaps aspiring to a unique and niche
identity by mainstream fashion, the signifiers of hipsterdom quickly lose their
potency and very quickly they are no longer marginal, due to their visibility and as
their presence as a spectacle (as hipster dress is arguably costume like). At the
moment the hipster is labeled as such, their authenticity is lost. Through their
identifiable fashion, hipsters arose as an identifiable subculture, but are now
defunct by the very fact they are recognizablea particularly post-modern trope.
Within the discourse of fashion as a cultural identity, subcultures in western
society seem to be dissolving into a major youth subculture; and it is pertinent to
investigate why today, a new subculture is based not on the actual culture but the
notion of taste itself; on a competition to be the most obscure, the most indie,
and the most anti-mainstream. This is only beginning to be considered in
academic research, but it is already a well-documented topic in popular media.
Countless Youtube videos, news articles and blog posts lament the cultural black
hole of the hipster, in both the United Kingdom and United States, and perhaps
beyond. Taking a further informed, cultural studies approach would aid an
understanding of more substance than merely pointing out the scene kids are
obnoxious to those outside their clique.
It is important to differentiate between young artists and those from
wealthier youth demographics that imitate their dress; it seems both are now
labeled hipsters by the mainstream. Perhaps the latter gave the former the
unfavorable reputation, but the scathing critiques subsume one into the other, it
would seem. The first camp have written their defenses, in hidden corners of
indie and academic websites. The latter seem fairly oblivious to the whole

discussion, where only ironic play in the form of a graphic t-shirt serves as their
self-commentary. Through tracing the disparity between subcultural modes of
style (as defined by cultural theories) and hipster style, and positing hipsterdom
as a product of postmodern tropes in expressing individual difference, here
begins an inquiry into the failure of hipster to become a subculture, in so far as a
subculture is resistant to the mainstream culture.

Marking Subcultural Style out of the Postmodern Era

Insofar as the discussion of the hipster is a cultural study, including their marking
of difference through fashion, it is necessary to situate their cultural grouping
within the larger topic of Subcultural style and its theoretical discourse. In the
chapter Youth, Style and Resistance, Chris Barker states that Subcultures do not
exist as authentic objects but have been brought into being by subculture
theorists (Barker, 2000: 322), therefore it is fundamentally important to look at
the usage and the construction of the term as classificatory (Barker, 2000:322).
Indeed, youth itself is a discursive construct (Barker, 2000: 321). Equally
significant is the recognition that they are not fixed, as all too often, theory
overlooks the dynamic quality of subcultural styles, discussed as though they
were immutably fixed phenomena (Muggleton, 2000: 50-51). This ability to
change and take on new meanings makes any determining, static theory on a
subculture problematic, thus forging new and continuing inquiry into subcultures
in the postmodern context (Muggleton, 2000: 64).
If subcultures are born from resisting the mainstream, let us first examine
the postmodern understanding of the birth of the mainstream (in which

understanding the mainstream can only exist relatively, in that it requires an

opposite, an alternative). The mainstream is formed through processes of
legitimization, through which the theorist Jean Francois Lyotard has called metanarratives, or grand narratives: philosophies of history, which make ethical
political, and, importantly here, cultural prescriptions for society, thus regulating
what is considered truth and a hegemonic structure of society (Lyotard, 1984).
Any alternative lifestyle, then, becomes a subculture, if this theoretical
construction of culture is assumed. The grand narrative of Modernism presents
the bourgeois notion of valuing the presentation of ones unique identity and selfexpression, which developed into a consumption of goods within a capitalist
framework to exhibit modes of this individual identity. It is arguable that all
subcultures resist this hegemony in differing ways.
To be as precise as possible, let us set out with the understanding that its
not the world that is postmodern, here, it is the perspective from which that world
is seen that is postmodern(Bertens, 10). There is not universally accepted
intellectual propositions about the human subject, language, or truth and
meaning. However, we can speak of the world as in a postmodern era insofar as
proposing that there is a cultural logic (Frederick Jamesons term) to our
historical moment, which enables an interpretation of postmodernism as the
superstructure of the current socio-economic order due to the ever-increasing
penetration of capitalism into our day-to-day existence [], in both the public and
private spheres.(Bertens, 1995: 10). This translates into the explosion of
consumer choice, commodification, and increasing self-reflexivity as
deconstructionalist theory (Foucault, Derrida, and so forth) encourages
awareness of these structures and resistance to hegemonic power. In recent

subcultures, by which I mean subcultures of the latter half of the 20 th century

(often referred to in fashion theory discourse as the postwar period), there is
evidence to support the theory that postmodernist themes play a central role to
how subcultures have operated.
In The Idea of the Postmodern, Hans Bertens argues that effective
subcultures that resist hegemonic culture have two key characteristics in play:
they hold a marginal status as well as being popular (as opposed to elitist)
(Bertens, 1995, 99). The fact that a subculture is resisting bourgeois culture
through a popular aesthetic signifies an anti-modernist, deconstructionalist aim,
thus situating the 20th century Subcultural movements (such as beatnik or punk)
within the postmodern discourse (Bertens, 1995: 100). Navigating the tension
between the individual and the collective identity, however, seems to have
brought to the forefront the notion of authenticity as a construct.

Authenticity and the Subversive Individual / Collective

In the realm of privileging marginal status, a key aspect of Subcultural

identity is authenticity. In his article Dressed in History: Retro Styles and the
Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture, Heike Jen states that the
authenticity of appearance is immediately linked with the self, and the body
becomes the site of identity and authenticity (Jen, 2004). As Noel McLaughin
discusses in Rock, Fashion and Performativity, in rock (music) culture, it is
others who dress up, we just are (my italics). The self versus the other in
subcultural style is the authentic against the inauthentic, those who ideally dress
as self-expression, as opposed to those who consciously dress to follow a culture

or subculture. These self-proclaimed authentic individuals are still within the

confines of the previously mentioned Modernist construction, where selfexpression is viewed as possible aculturally, not as a product of culture but as the
creative agency of the individual.
What unites subcultures is, paradoxically, their aim of non-conformity to
the mainstream; therefore, as individuals, an subcultural identity is problematic to
varying degrees, depending on their subjective conception of what it means to
be a particular Subcultural identity. In Inside Subculture: The Postmodern
Meaning of Style, David Muggleton explores the extent to which youth align
themselves with a movement and the degree to which they self-labelthe prime
reason for the dislike of labeling [being] restriction. However, the conflict here is
resolvable, when subculturalists are attempting to re-characterize their social
group as one of anti-structure (Muggleton, 60). This requires a very diverse
definition that also includes collective aspects (Muggleton, 61). Subcultures of
the latter half of the 20th century, then, have been seen to use fashion as a
language to symbolically express alternatives to the mainstream.

Cultural Capital: Style as Code

Pierre Bourdieu pioneered the term cultural capital which is particularly

useful to the discussion of sartorial expression in subculture. Literally, we can
conceive of the choices made of fashioning the dress on the body as a kind of
value that then translates to power as social means: the capital being ones
representations of taste, in a cultural framework. Bourdieu iterates that capital

beyond an economic context, thus social or cultural capital, means there is an

economy of lingustic and symbolic value that informs identity (Bourdieu, 1986).
Thus, subcultural style uses particular modes of dress, particular apparel and
accessories (including adornment of the body, such as tattoos and piercings) to
communicate specific codes of Bourdieuian cultural capital. Cultural capital
means that dress is always context specific, as the example of the punks use of
bricolage (giving familiar symbols new meanings through contextual strategies) to
express the individuals impetus to counter the mainstream and subvert it, such
as wearing an every day household object, the safety pin, as body jewelry or
clothing adornment (Kratz & Reimer, 1998, 199). Cultural groups are always in a
competition over cultural capital in attempting to legitimize a particular style as
the most valuable in terms of cool (Muggleton, 2000: 64).
In terms of economic capital, in the 1950s, the youth market grew out of
a commodification of youthforged on the back of the surplus cash which
working class youth was thought to have at its disposal (Barker, 2000: 321).
From the new teenage consumer came a diversity of subcultures with strongly
identifiable fashion statements, such as the Mods in the 1960s. This consuming
teenager (Barker, 2000) was, paradoxically, attempting an alternative to the
perceived boredom of everyday life, yet participating in it through the mundane
practice of consumerism. This paradox seems to have carried into youth
subcultures across the postwar period. However, there are several post-war
(World War II) subcultures that exemplify alternatives to the mainstream that
(albeit somewhat conflictingly) resisted capitalist consumerism: beatniks in the
50s and 60s, hippies in the 60s, and punks in the 80s (Muggleton, 2000).
These subcultures were problematized in the 1990s when the nostalgia for a

prominent western youth subculture turned into the commodification of these

idealized subcultures. This has resulted into a purchased lifestyle through
fashion and other goodsand the construct of authenticity has been once again
brought into question.
Since authenticity is a cultural construction, it is no more authentic than any
other self consciously created identity (Jen, 2004).
The postmodern, then, is a formal demarcation of the moment of realizing
the presence of the Modernist structure and, therefore, alternatives to it. With this
knowledge comes the ability to play with signs, symbols, and signifiers and their
meanings. Here, Fashion is less of a language than a limited set of prefabricated
codes (Miles, 1998). The hipster, as I will argue, is the manifestation of this play
in an age where obscurity becomes more valuable as the darker corners of
culture are revealed through the technology of the digital and internet age. Being
able to appropriate and reinterpret mass culture to create new meanings is a
particular characteristic of the post-modern era subcultures, and the increasing
inter-textuality requires more and more cultural literacy, producing higher and
higher standards of being able to interpret and understand the complex
languages of dress. But subcultural tastes remain exclusive only for so long as
they are unknown or inaccessible to the majority (Muggleton, 64), and this is
where we see the dissolution of contemporary cool.

The Impossibility of Hipster to Emerge As A Subcultural Identity

In terms of the word subculture, the sub has connoted notions of

distinctiveness and difference from the dominant or mainstream society. Hence,

the notion of an authentic subculture depends on its binary opposite, the idea of
an inauthentic mass produced mainstream or dominant culture (Barker,
2000:322). However, the line between mainstream and non-mainstream is
increasingly blurred, as technology increases visibility in a global scale. To be as
precise as possible as to whom I am referring, the hipster is a person who
adopts a certain style of dress, living, and modes of discourse that satirize,
collage, and re-appropriate modes of culture past and present, particularly any
past niche cultural objects. It is thought of as a youth culture, yet it has
intergenerational participants; in its contemporary form, hipsters appear to have
waves from different generations. This phenomenon occurs mainly in the
dominant western societies in Europe and North America, but due to the
increasing mobility and dispersing of media through the internet, the hipster
aesthetic can be found worldwide (the knowledge of understanding the meaning
of this term is debatable, and is worthy of a larger academic investigation itself).
The hipsters have taken up the project of attempting to create difference through
a kitsch pastiche of past difference, but even this mode of resistance has been
commodified and found its way into the mainstream. This theory is supported in
an essay by Jace Clayton for the book What Was The Hipster? published by
n+1, an (arguably hipster) literary journal. Clayton concurs that the rise of the
hipster is intrinsically linked to widespread internet use and the dwindling time in
which a fashion moves from an expression of individual style to something
photographed, blogged, reported on, turned into a trend, marketed, and sold
(Greif, et. al., 2010: 27).
What I am calling the hipster has been discussed by Muggleton in Inside
Subculture as the post-subculturalist, a new cultural formation under

10

postmodernity. His post-subculturalist revel in the availability of Subcultural

choice and no longer have any sense of Subcultural authenticity[] which is
tied to underlying structural relations. Here we see a glut of revivals,
Subcultural fragmentation and proliferation and overall Style Surfing
(Muggleton, 2000: 47). However, the problem is that the mainstream now does
accept this mode of spectacle, as we can see in the popularity of artists such as
Lady Gaga (her name itself a pop culture reference). There is decreasing ability
to mark difference by engaging in the play of symbols. The hipster is, in effect,
the cultural manifestation of the tension of irony and authenticity at play, a
uniquely hipster trope that could only emerge in the postmodern environment.
The lack of any new subculture thus produces nostalgia for all subcultures of the
past. Therefore, the themes in hipster fashion have thus developed as any form
of eclecticism, obscurity and references that become ironic appropriation.
Because the postmodern era lacks a grand narrative, one can take pleasure in
referencing, with a wink, other grand narrative historical moments, as if the only
space for innovation is in reinterpretation and intertexuality. Frederick Jameson
describes this as modernist styles[becoming] postmodernist codes (Jameson,
1984, 65).
The failure of the hipster as subculture also includes a discussion of
access in terms of gender, race and class, as well as the site of the body, and the
intersectionality of these terms. Male hipsters, through wearing skinny jeans, use
of color, and by nature of presenting themselves through fashion to the gaze
can be viewed as challenging assumptions about sexuality and gender. Female
hipsters can operate similarly through modes of androgynous style. Hipsters
seem to include and accept racial difference and queer identities, especially

11

fluidity within categories. However, Skinny jeans themselves imply the wearer
should convey a waifish appeal, and there is a distinctive privileging of a
malnourished looking body that is akin to fashions obsession with the ultra thin.
In terms of class, hipsters are most problematic. At the height of inauthenticity,
middle class youth fakes disenfranchisement, appropriating working class
symbols to gain cultural capital as authentic and express difference from their
peers and/or parents, which is increasingly chronicled by annoyed hipsters with
supposed less economic privelege. An example follows from Lida Hujic for the
Guardian: The Shoreditch Twat distinguished between the genuine creatives
who were drawn to the area in search of similarly minded people and the fakes opportunists who wanted to cash in on this creative hub, or faux artistes
pretending to be scruffy and yet having loads of money from their parents (Hujic,
2006). As the hipster has no major agenda except resisting the identity of
normative consumers, there fails to be a foundational authenticity that creates a
significant social movement. To resist consumerism and commodification is
proving harder than just avoiding mainstream retail and goods such as Primark or
Starbucks. The hipsters emphasis on resistance through consumerist choice
(choosing fair trade coffee or vintage clothing over mainstream brands) fails to
create a significant statement of change or rebuttal to capitalism. The
contemporary liberal youth is thus significantly complacent and yet, the hipster
seems to claim a counterculture presence.
As clearly a much larger discussion that deserves its own in-depth inquiry,
hipster fashion trickling up and trickling down (a term used by Elizabeth Wilson
among many fashion theorists to denote mobility) is important to mention here.
Hipster fashion is copied and repackaged by both high street and couture

12

designers (figure 2.1 and 2.2), for mainstream and elite markets, respectively.
Either way, the grunge/trash/dada/ironic look is further diluted and the power to
represent a cultural identity of an alternative, anti-consumerist, counterculture is
negated. Those who were originally hipster now have their look ripped off and
their sartorial signifiers are seen everywhere from tourists in SoHo (as fashion
trickles down) to Bryant Park at New York Fashion Week (as fashion trickles up).
In an interview with the Boston Pheonix, Robert Lanham, editor of
FREEwilliamsburg.com (a lifestyle guide for the trendy Brooklyn borough),
remarked that the surplus of fancy schools in Boston leaves the thrift shops
barren since upper-class hipsters rush to buy clothing to give themselves the
bohemian look (Mahoney, 2003), an example of the trickle up effect, as these
consumers have the capital to purchase much more expensive, new
commodities. Todays original vintage clothes function like designer labels, as
markers of distinction (Jen, 2004).
The youth that once identified each other through dress now cannot rely
on this method of self or group identification, because it now lacks authenticity.
As a marker of taste, the second-hand look that once implied a lifestyle and a
cultural capital is now reduced to a sartorial statement. A young person wearing a
tweed jacket and black framed glasses would suggest an intellectual in the past;
but stripped of any grand narrative and a recently appropriated by luxury
designers and high street chains, the nerd look suggests someone following
trends, and actual intellectuals dress comes into question.

The Hipster: An Easy Target for Cultural Parody

13

Just as there are fashion victims in the mainstream, there seems to be a

particular development of hipster fashion victimsthe imitators or followers of
hipster fashion. Even if youth styles are globally available via
the media, to perform a style convincingly is part of a more complex
process of involvement and engagement, crucial to active identity formation
(Jen, 2004). The youth chronicled (both elevated and parodied) in blogs such as
Look At That Fucking Hipster, seem to be victim to subscribing to multiple
trends identifiable to the hipster lifestyle and aesthetic for the sake of attempting
to be cool. They wear 1970s eyeglasses, scarves worn a particular in way,
tattoos, sit on grimy floors, wearing the appropriate headphones, and so forth, to
a collective absurd effect. This is where the mainstream and alternative media
both take swings at today's overeducated, underworked dilettantes (Mahoney,
2003). The youth who wear hipster styles but lack the informed play of their dress
is where we find the irritation of authentic hipsters, disgusted by an empty
mimicry of their style, because the mimicry lacks their ironic subversion of low
culture and mainstream style and instead becomes a commodified, mainstream
style. The cultural studies theorist Llewellyn Negrin confirms that the modern
individual is fashioned, and is more interested, in the authority of the sign than in
the element it representsones identity is defined in terms of the image that one
creates through ones consumption of goods, including the clothes one wears
(Negrin, 2008, 46.)
The double irony of the hipster is that a person intending to create irony
through wearing purposefully unfashionable clothing ( for example, an
academics garb) is that in todays age of technology, the irony of whatever they
deem fashionably unfashionable will so quickly be appropriated by cool seekers

14

in the mainstream, commercial and individual. As soon as its noted in the media,
its already uncoolthus the rule that uncool is the new cool is already a failure of
contemporary attempts at subcultural style. This makes hipsters an easy target
for the media, which points out the contradictions in the hipster cultural identity,
the fact that these young people are buying in as much as anybody else. Crossculturally today in the western world, it seems that instead of finding an authentic
self, we work on producing it. As Jen argues further, at a time of
individualization and an idealization of singularity (Eberlein 2000), where the
individual is forced to localize itself, the world of commodities provides key tools
for identity construction, social communication and navigating the self within
groups and communities (Jen, 2004). The hipster is not outside of this aspect
of western identity, though it seems some are under delusions otherwise, and
here we find their irritating quality and an easily parodied self-seriousness.
We see this parody of the hipster in media such as television and online
videosjust two examples within media including film, music, art, and so on. In
two very recent television series, Portlandia and Nathan Barley, the hipster is
presented with absurd hyperbole in their habitat, where the locale is key to their
identity (Portland, Oregon, USA and London, United Kingdom, respectively).
Nathan Barley in particular plays on the relationship of an aging, more authentic
hipster to his new-wave hipster market (figure 3.1). There are countless youtube
videos parodying the hipster and marking its existence, the height of this
culminating in a much-viewed video titled Being A Dickheads Cool (still from
moving image, figure 3.2), which satirizes the many ways in which youth uses
and abuses fashion and lifestyle to create cultural capital and articulates the
irritation this causes (hence, the dickhead label). At its worst, hipsterdom

15

marks the end of western civilization (from an article from AdBusters) I would
posit the idea that, rather, it marks the failure of the established subculture
structure in a sped-up, redefined post modern world.
A glimpse into self-parody can be seen on websites such as the nowdefunct www.shoreditchtwat.com where the painfully self aware hipster club
promoter Neil Boorman advertised to those in the know of the East London
scene. In an effort to reclaim coolness in the midst of the mainstream medias
critique, hipsters self parody can be seen through underground publications such
as Sleazenation (1996-2003), where cover blurbs sneered, Now even more
superficial/Over 100 pages of hype & lies" and "Absolute sell out" (2001). A later
editor, Steve Beale, articulated the publications possession of cultural capital in
an interview with The Independent: "If anything, we are an anti-style magazine,
but you have to know how to be stylish to be unstylish. One of the greatest assets
of the members of our team is the way they can analyze popular psychology and
culture (Rodger, 1998). Nothing could so perfectly encapsulate the hipsters
attempt to rise above mainstream critique and visibility.

Conclusion: Where Can Authenticity Remain?

Once hipster style was a pronounced style, those wanting to gain the
cultural capital through wearing the outer signifiers of what encapsulated the
contemporary bohemian lifestyle easily reproduced it through a frenzy of
consumption. Once this became overly visible, and clear that there was a
movement of downward mobility, these barely rebels, clearly with no cause
were poised to be the main site of ridicule and critique in the media. Finally, we

16

can acknowledge this essay itself as in accord with hipster tastes and, in line with
the overtly self-aware and self-analyzing modality of an ideal intellectual lifestyle
of the hipster. To be nauseated by this word hipster, as it seems many are, is to
experience nausea at the hand of both rampant consumerism as well as
postmodern labeling and critique ad finitum.
The hipster ensembleoutfits that present a spectacle of ironic
references, niche interests, and play of genrehas come to symbolize an elitist
pretentiousness, and herein lies the groups fatal error as a youth counterculture.
Vintage and retro clothing can no longer function as the original bohemian
message. Symbolically, this style of dress now reads as a signifier of snobbery
and elitism, the antithesis of the mainstream-resistant ethos of subcultures.
The original intent of the contemporary hipster, by definition, is anti-consumerist,
in attempting to be anti-mainstream. But this group becomes self defeating when
anti-mainstream is touted through alternative commodities, thus still requiring
the consumer, who now literally buys into the lifestyle of indie vinyl records, worn
sneakers, and 1930s briefcases. However, it seems the hipster aesthetic is a
natural collective cultural response to globalization. As Elizabeth Wilson notes,
our culture of global mass media feeds us so much information that a massive
cultural eclecticism is the only possible response (Wilson 1992: 6). We cannot
rid ourselves entirely of the question of authenticity; we just have to understand
how it is invested with meanings in the different social and cultural contexts
(Jen, 2004). Ultimately, seeking authenticity can only result in inauthenticity, and
the cultural crisis resulting reaches an apex in the cultural phenomenon of the
hipster.

17

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Appendix - Images
Figure 1.1

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Figure 1.2 (both from Pigeons & Peacocks, 2010)

Figure 2.2 Tracy Reese, 2008 (www.style.com)

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Figure 2.1 H&M advertisement, 2009 (hotbeautyhealth.com)

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Figure 3.1 Still from television series Nathan Barley, Channel 4 (2011)

Figure 3.2 Still from Being A Dickheads Cool (Youtube)

24