The question sounds like a #slatepitch , but it actually came from this morning’s Guardian : Could the much-reviled hipster — with his skinny pants, 1970s math-professor glasses, ironic moustache, and love of finely crafted vintage leather goods — actually be a force for good in the world?
U.K.-based writer Anna Leach thinks so. She flips the charge that hipsters are, in part, co-opting gay style by arguing that the cultural pillaging actually helps homosexuals . The proliferation of gay-looking straight people, she writes:
means you can run around large swaths of London being as gay as you want. And while outside the East End bubble it’s still reckless to hold hands with your partner or look in any way physically attracted to someone of the same sex, you can at least mooch about in skinny jeans, hoodies and some form of sneaker and instead of classing you as a threatening gender-defying dyke, people will just assume you’re a hipster. In that case, take more of my subculture, please!
“Fashion references,” Leach goes on to say, “don’t make for automatic tolerance.” And she knows that “Chloë Sevigny isn’t Martin Luther King.” But hipster bars and dance clubs provide safe spaces for gays — cool safe spaces — and their general air of disaffectedness allows for a live-and-let-live kind of attitude.
Leach’s essay recalls something I read in critic — and current Slate Music Club participant — Carl Wilson’s post on how the hipster has become “the bogeyman of the age.” Wilson wrote that the kind of hipster-bashing practiced on, say, the Look at this Fucking Hipster blog is
a tribal rejoinder against deliberately standing out, looking, however trivially, conspicuously deviant, especially in some way people find hard to “read.” … [For] all its internal conformism it’s still a mode of flamboyant aesthetic display and that still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it.
Wilson, like Leach, argues that the hipster aesthetic — whether consciously or not — does some important work in the culture, though they’re arguing it from opposite ends. In Wilson’s framework, the hipster has the potential to be a kind of dissident, his theatrical appearance exposing his detractors’ “paranoid craving for a restoration of social order.” In Leach’s essay, it’s the normalization of the look that’s key, in that it creates new safe spaces for sexual minorities as it spreads. Either way, it should make you feel better about riding the L train .
Photograph by Walter Lockwood/Getty Images.
