The Evolution of American Hipster Subculture

Skinny jeans, chunky glasses, and T-shirts with vintage logos—the contemporary American hipster is a recognizable figure in the United States. Based predominately in metropolitan areas, sometimes clustered around hotspots such as the Williamsburg neighborhood in New York City, or in parts of Portland, Oregon, hipsters define themselves through a rejection of the mainstream and a carefully curated adoption of ironic fashions and perspectives. As a subculture, hipsters casually spurn many of the values, beliefs and outward presentations of mainstream U.S. culture, often preferring oddly hybridized “retro” clothing to more formalized professional attire. Despite this partly oppositional stance, the aesthetic symbols of hipster subculture are increasingly being folded back into mainstream culture. We can see here a difference in how subcultures, which can generally be assimilated into the mainstream, and countercultures, which are typically too antagonistic to be integrated smoothly, understand themselves and are commonly understood by non-members. While hipster culture may seem to be the new trend among middle-class youth and casual-professional young adults, the history of “hip” movements can actually be traced back to the early decades of the 1900s. In fact, the term “hipster” had already been associated with an earlier self-selecting movement.

Where did the hipster culture begin? In the early 1940s, jazz music was on the rise in the United States. Musicians were known as “hepcats” and had a smooth, relaxed quality that went against upright, mainstream life. Those who were “hep” or “hip” lived by the code of jazz, while those who were “square” lived according to society’s rules. The idea of a “hipster” was born. One who was “hip” was “in the know,” and chose to recognize others who were similarly aware of and engaged in the same beliefs and practices.

The hipster movement spread, and young people, drawn to the music and fashion, took on attitudes and language derived from the culture of jazz. Unlike the vernacular of the day, hipster slang was purposefully exclusionary, and its verbal codes reflected and informed the social habits and dispositions of its users. When hipsters said, “It’s cool, man,” they were referring to a cultural mood that emphasized a certain relaxation in the face of hardship, as well as a preference for certain desirable forms of music and dress.

Figure 2. In the 1940s, U.S. hipsters were associated with the “cool” culture of jazz. (Photo courtesy of William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress)

By the 1950s, the jazz culture was winding down and many traits of hepcat culture were becoming mainstream. A new counterculture was on the rise. The “Beat Generation,” a phrase coined by writer Jack Kerouac, was anti-conformist and anti-materialistic. They were writers who listened to jazz and who embraced that movement’s “cool” ethos of separatism and free expression. They bummed around, hitchhiked the country, and lived in squalor, accepting that to be “beat” was to be self-consciously “down and out” or “beaten down.”

The lifestyle spread. College students, clutching copies of Kerouac’s On the Road, dressed in berets, black turtlenecks, and black-rimmed glasses. Women wore black leotards and grew their hair long. Herb Caen, a San Francisco journalist, used the suffix from Sputnik 1, the Russian satellite that orbited Earth in 1957, to dub the movement’s followers “Beatniks.” This belated coinage quickly came to be seen as a pejorative, and Kerouac and his compatriots never used it themselves, preferring “Beat” or “Beat Generation,” both of which had been circulating among them since 1948 and 1952, respectively.

Figure 3. Self-consciously “nerdish” and trendy, today’s hipsters define themselves through cultural irony, the aesthetics of which are often disseminated via social media. (Photo courtesy of Lorena Cupcake/Wikimedia Commons)

As the Beat Generation faded, a new, related movement began. It too focused on breaking social boundaries, but it also advocated freedom of expression, mystical and psychedelic philosophies and music, and free love. It took its name from the generations before; in fact, some theorists claim that Beats themselves coined the term to describe their children. Over time, the “hip” beats of the 1950s morphed into the counterculture movement known in the 1960s and early 1970s as the “hippies.” We can see how this cultural history allows us to to trace the evolution of the term “hip.” With some modifications, the concept it names has endured as part of certain countercultures and subcultures.

Today’s generation of hipsters share certain elements of the “hip” ethos with their cultural forebears such as the jazz hepcats, the Beats and the hippies. Although contemporary hipsters may not seem to have much in common with 1940s hipsters, the emphasis on nonconformity and being “in the know” is still there. In 2010, sociologist Mark Greif set about investigating the hipster subculture of the United States and found that much of what tied the group members together was not exclusively based on fashion, musical taste, or even a specific point of contention with the mainstream. Instead, “all hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties,” Greif wrote, “Pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. (Greif 2010). Much as the hepcats of the jazz era opposed common culture with carefully crafted appearances of coolness and relaxation, modern hipsters reject mainstream values with a studiously posed apathy.

Young people are often drawn to oppose mainstream conventions, even if in the same way that others do. Ironic, cool to the point of non-caring, and quasi-intellectual, hipsters continue to perform a subcultural group identity, complete with its own orientations and rituals.