I spent a long time on a post dealing with how I view hipsters. Specifically, I've been trying to figure out why I find the presence of men with patchy beards, moppy hair, glasses with thick black plastic frames unsettling. Yeah, there's a guy on the subway wearing frames with fake lenses, and yeah, it looks kinds dumb, and yeah, he was probably going for "kinda dumb." So what? Why this urge to take his fake glasses and grind them beneath my heel?
I'm realizing that making a broad generalization about a population or subculture is difficult to do, especially when it's based primarily on dress. I work with a lot of people who, judging on style alone, could be considered of the Hipster Class.
Hipsterdom is a little disconcerting, because where I just came from, clothing wasn't judged just on style, but on practicality. Here, you would rarely be asked, "That's a great looking sweater, but would it hold up when you had to use your sleeve to wipe the snow off your windshield, because the car door's frozen shut?"
As much as I dislike the idea of men walking around in skinny jeans that, let's face it, were probably bought in the women's section of JC Penny, a lot of my hipster coworkers seem like decent folks with great senses of humor. (Of course, if you are a man purposely wearing women's jeans, you probably have a sense of humor about yourself by default.)
There's no doubt that the hipster culture makes me feel every one of my 33 years. It's a sub-culture I don't understand. Why the obsession with Pabst Blue Ribbon? Moustaches? Sweaters that should only be wore by your grandmother or the late Kurt Cobain? I feel like I'm on the outside, a square, an old man banging on the pipes yelling at them to "turn down that god damn rock and roll!"
On the plus side, I do like their old-timey hats.
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