Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chlo Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie's, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney's moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR's Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?
Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.
It was in the real-estate section of one of the city's lesser dailies, under the headline luxury seems to be set for the lower east side, that I found an astonishing remark attributed to Michael Desjadon, the director of sales at Massey Knakal: "The profile of the typical renter in the area is changing from the 'counterculture hipster' to the 'more mainstream' hipster and young professional."
"I wish I'd thought of this phrase, but we call the Lower East Side 'the last real neighborhood in New York,'" Desjadon, an amiable fellow and a patron of LES bars, told me when I called him up. "The mainstream hipster," he explained, "is not an artist or a musician. He has an office job, and wears one hat to work and another at night." Presumably, the latter is a trucker—or a porkpie—hat.
The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the "indie yuppie," an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom. His haircut may be asymmetrical, but his dog never misses a walk. And around the corner, sleeping on couches, neophyte slackers dream until they wake up late for their temp jobs. The savvy among them soon grasp that they've arrived at the party too late.
Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chlo Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie's, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney's moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR's Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.It was in the real-estate section of one of the city's lesser dailies, under the headline luxury seems to be set for the lower east side, that I found an astonishing remark attributed to Michael Desjadon, the director of sales at Massey Knakal: "The profile of the typical renter in the area is changing from the 'counterculture hipster' to the 'more mainstream' hipster and young professional.""I wish I'd thought of this phrase, but we call the Lower East Side 'the last real neighborhood in New York,'" Desjadon, an amiable fellow and a patron of LES bars, told me when I called him up. "The mainstream hipster," he explained, "is not an artist or a musician. He has an office job, and wears one hat to work and another at night." Presumably, the latter is a trucker—or a porkpie—hat.
The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the "indie yuppie," an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom. His haircut may be asymmetrical, but his dog never misses a walk. And around the corner, sleeping on couches, neophyte slackers dream until they wake up late for their temp jobs. The savvy among them soon grasp that they've arrived at the party too late.
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