Hipsters: They’re Just Like Us
Hipsters are everywhere. When people think of hipsters, they think of someone who wears thrift store clothes, square glasses and visits unknown coffee shops on the corner of the street.
Identifying as a hipster can often be taboo due to the cultural ridicule it receives, but that doesn’t stop people from expressing themselves through thrift store clothes and unique Instagram captions. Hipsters go to their Vampire Weekend concerts and shop at Urban Outfitters, but they’re just like you and me.
“It’s a title I’m very proud of because I think it’s important that lesser known things get recognition too,” Gwyn Pryor, senior said.
Hipsters are not defined by a certain style either. Pryor, who described herself as a hipster, depicted them as simply people who support “non-mainstream things” such as small businesses and lesser known music, but she still emphasizes the difference between hipster people and “indie” people.
“Indie just means independent. Indie is something that’s on its own, it doesn’t have its support from anything else except from itself. Hipster is just supporting things that aren’t mainstream. They really go hand in hand sometimes,” Pryor said. “The mainstream things usually have a lot of support from things but independent will have a hard time getting into the mainstream because of its lack of support.”
Ashley Mansour, junior, doesn’t define herself as a hipster but agrees that she listens to non-mainstream music. “Calling yourself hipster isn’t hipster,” Mansour jokingly said.
Mansour described stereotypical hipsters as “people who think they’re better than everyone else because they don’t listen to regular music. I don’t really think I’m better than everyone else just because I don’t like the same music as them. I think it’s just a personal preference of what music you like.”
The stigma around hipsters sure is rough. Think back to 2010 and you’ll remember the spread of “hipster” memes, which consisted of photoshopping glasses onto something and captioning it with a phrase like, “You’ve never heard of it,” or “I liked it before it was cool.” which transformed what it means to be a hipster. Jokes aside, hipsters don’t want any trouble; they just want to listen to Alt-j in peace.
“I think (making fun of hipsters) is dumb. It’s not like I’m like, ‘Oh my God I think mainstream music is awful and nobody should listen to it’, I just personally don’t want to listen to it,” Mansour said.
Grant Hoffman, junior, doesn’t personally identify with the hipster label either, but realized that around his freshman or sophomore year, he began to do things that are “kind of hipster.”
“When people think of hipsters they think of guys with bow ties or suspenders or really weird beards and I’m not like that at all. When I think of my appearance I don’t look like a hipster,” Hoffman said. I think that part of being a hipster is not totally obeying stereotypes and if I completely fit the image of a hipster I would be obeying a stereotype and that’s not something I do.”
In the spirit of hipsterism, it’s important to note that hipsters are more than the stereotype: they eat dinner with their families, they feed their dogs in the morning, and they step out of the mainstream all the while.
“If you look at hipsters as people who are just trying to do cool things and then other people start doing those things later on that’s great. It means I’m a trendsetter, it means that other people think that what I do is cool and that’s a good thing,” Hoffman said.
As ironically hipster as you might be, Pryor agrees that people should follow trends that they like, without worrying about others’ opinions.
“If they enjoy it and that’s the style they like, then more power to them. People should just do what they enjoy,” Pryor said.
