Day 1 - How to Become a Mexican Hipster

Coming back from a long silence - I am here to entertain you with a personal, humorous project that my boyfriend, flatmate and I have embarked upon.

My flatmate Jesse and I have long struggled with what it means to be a hipster, and our strong dislike towards people we feel are faux hipsters or just hipsters. It's not that we dislike them personally, we both have an aversion to the culture they are projecting inadvertently onto our lifestyle. We live in a loft, he rides a bike, I hang out with artists, he is usually vegetarian, I own a pair of skinny jeans... All of these are generally earmarks for hipsters.

So after a fair amount of jokes, lengthy discussions about what "hipster" means to us, and asking everyone we know what a hipster is and to reassure us that we are not hipsters, my boyfriend Diego decided he would like to try to become a hipster, and to see how long the process of being a cool Mexican to becoming a hipster Mexican would take.

We began yesterday by finding accepted hipster definitions:

1. \hip-stur\ n. One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term "cool"; a Hipster would instead say "deck.") The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat. -The Hipster Handbook, Robert Lanham
2. "Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care."
   — Time, July 2009^[5]
3. Hipsters (also scenesters^[1]) are a subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with musical interests mainly in alternative rock that appeared in the 1990s. Other interests in media would include independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.^[2]
4. Hipster culture has been described as a "mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior[s]." ~Douglas Haddow (2008-07-29). "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization". Adbusters. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
5.  “Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other ‘Hipster'"
   
6. A 2009 Time magazine article described hipsters thus: "take your grandmother's sweater and Bob Dylan's Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam — hipster."
7.  In 2003, Robert Lanham's satirical book The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with "mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes... strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags."
8. This particular article might be outdated or misinformed but it does capture some of the ideas of hipsterism and debates the current modality of the subculture. Which might now be the culture?
9. "While mainstream society of the 2000s had been busying itself with reality television, dance music, and locating the whereabouts of Britney Spears’s underpants, an uprising was quietly and conscientiously taking place behind the scenes. Long-forgotten styles of clothing, beer, cigarettes and music were becoming popular again. Retro was cool, the environment was precious and old was the new ‘new’. Kids wanted to wear Sylvia Plath’s cardigans and Buddy Holly’s glasses — they revelled in the irony of making something so nerdy so cool. They wanted to live sustainably and eat organic gluten-free grains. Above all, they wanted to be recognised for being different — to diverge from the mainstream and carve a cultural niche all for themselves. For this new generation, style wasn’t something you could buy in a department store, it became something you found in a thrift shop, or, ideally, made yourself. The way to be cool wasn’t too look like a television star: it was to look like as though you’d never seen television."
   — Matt Granfield, HipsterMattic
10. This is probably my favorite of all: a mathematical equation and proof of the hipster.

    7) ‘HIPSTER’ DEFINED
    I offer line (d) in the above proof as a definition of ‘hipster’. A hipster is someone that belongs to a set that defines itself as not belonging to any set.

    
    If Jesse and I were to be brutally honest with ourselves, these are the kinds of hipster we would be:
    

    

    Jesse

Kaity

So follow us down to Hipster Town & discover whether Diego can become the hipster of his dreams ...

Go on, scenesters, go start barricading your "unheard of, awesome" whatevers. We'll do it despite you.