Hipsters 101: Their History, Bleak Future

Hipsters. They “sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay”; they “sport cowboy hats and berets”; they’re “the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer.” But they’re certainly not a new phenomenon, writes Dan Fletcher for Time. The first jazz-loving hipsters emerged in the 1930s; after World War II, Norman Mailer “painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death.”

The first generation of hipsters was replaced by hippies, and yet another crop emerged in the early 1990s to recycle trends past: “Take your grandmother’s sweater and Bob Dylan’s Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars, and a can of Pabst and bam—hipster,” Fletcher writes. They have been described as “the death of Western civilization,” and as “hipsterdom's largest natural habitat”—Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood—is threatened by squatters, “there aren’t many who are concerned.”