With apologies to anyone who’s been giving up their weekends to grow a turmeric beard or bang up a palette cot for their newborn… the hipster movement is over. The slow cooked meat, eating your eggs from a breadboard and macraméing your pubic hair into a stubby holder for your craft beer era is over. Thank you. You’ve given me more than you know. Not just endless jokes at your expense, but damn it if you don’t run a fine cafe. You made flannelette shirts so expensive, farmers had to start wearing hi vis instead. I would like to thank you for really improving the general appearance of chinless men, and for making my tattoo-free body something unique. You see, clean skin is the new tattoo – I’m now graphically deviant. Years from now, young people will gasp at the shocking sight of my un-inked arms. They’ll recoil muttering ‘how disgusting.’ They’ll know I was an old lady with a story.
The hipster trend has been at peak zietgeist for well over a decade. It’s clearly time for a new trend. Who decides? The young. They decide. They have always decided. As soon as old people start adopting your trend, it’s dead in the water. I don’t really do trends anymore – it’s too much effort, and I’m too worried I’ll look like a try-hard.
Unfortunately, being a try-hard has never been on-trend, otherwise Christians would be cool. There was a time however when I was a shameless trend follower. Trends are usually about fashion, music, haircuts and lifestyle choices. It’s never just fashion alone. My first major trend adoption was a three week attempt at being ‘punk’. This involved buying lace-up black boots and hand drawing an Anarchy sign on them, dying my hair black and shaving the sides and wearing lots of eyeliner. I joined an Anarchist group who met at a place called Annares; named after the planet in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, which was settled by Odionian separatists in exile from its double planet Urras. This ambiguous utopia was populated by surly-faced Brisbane punks, who knew a Queensland Summer was too hot to wear rubber, but pushed on. Makeup sweated off faster than you could apply it. I also did the typesetting for an anarchist publication – the only article I remember was about why it was our duty to shoplift to bring down capitalism. I could overthrow David Jones one stolen g-string at a time but I lost interest… well, I got caught subverting the dominant paradigm.
So I tried being a mod. This meant having to watch Quadrophenia and relate to angst-ridden postal workers – hence the Vespa. Girls sat on the back. Mod boys were too small to contend with a girl like me. When I sat on the back, the front wheel no longer touched the street. So I became a grunge-swampy-feminist. A Goth. It involved growing armpit and leg hair and telling everyone to get fucked. I was a natural. Except, staying pale was a problem because I have naturally olive skin. Oh how I longed for the pallid complexion of the unwell. I learnt how to dance in a lurching backwards forwards motion, and I got to listen to Nick Cave, which I actually liked, and a whole bunch of bands I used to pretend to like. I secretly loved Bruce Springsteen. Trends are exhausting and have this cult-like effect of curating your hair, your mind and your mix tape. So what’s post-hipster? Urban creatives? (Yuccies) Cutesters? They’re adults who dress like little kids wearing beanies and teddy backpacks. What about Normcore? That’s mum jeans and slippers, and unfashionable outdated bumbags and pyjamas. Hang on… I still wear that shit…
I have a trend prediction. I’ve seen a lot of young people in mullets. I have to admit they look good. Old people in mullets look like they’re on parole, young people look like they’re on a Paris catwalk. It’s soft bogan. Bogan Goth. Eco-Bogans. What do you think? What is your trend prediction for 2020?
I’m glad they’re gone.
My beard felt culturally appropriated.
As someone who has had a beard almost as long as I’ve had a face, finally the hipster wave may soon recede and leave the hirsuity where it belongs.
Is it too much to hope that soon the pubes & underarms will be similarly liberated to breathe free?
We went to a hipster cafe in a village not far from Byron a few years ago and couldn’t get served, presumably because we were too beardless (we also wouldn’t be able to get a coffee in Helmand province for the same, and other, reasons). Hopefully we can now get a coffee there. Apart from that, I had/have no problem with them, after all, they did inspire the Bondi Hipsters series!
I suspect you are jumping on the trend of narcissism though…..
Hmmm… the inner layer of the hipster, which up until recently, I seemed to have entirely missed except that it seems to have changed product labelling… i’m Just so uncool… although now you point it out, I really like that look…
so the inner layer… the morphing metamorphi… I don’t think it’s actually a word… it fits perfectly as an example of confusion & misinterpretation that creates something lucidly mixed in multiple things we love.. juxtaposition & reinterpretation …the young cropped bearded, with big curling, twisted at the end moustaches( or the ones with a few slightly twisted young face pubes hanging from above their top lip like a drapery garden over a windowsill desperately in need of water & we all know that story at the moment. Baseball cap, peak front & centre, hair unwashed, carrying extra long skateboards or riding electric ones….
gangster pirates reinventing the hippy paradise…
Um…
I was surprised at this outstanding ‘new look’..
at least they had their jeans pulled up over their boxers…maybe it was just the wind… didn’t seem to last long… freedom of expression… especially for the curl…
We have all had our fashion moments… I remember buying a designer label pair of harem pants, young in Sydney, after having my very long hair lopped off for a ‘Lady Di’. Happened upon this store I had never been into before in the city.. ooooo.. a special!!! Oh really.. oh yes & wow.. a belt as well.. actually, a bra top that didn’t fit.. girl just loves to accessorize.. Bought a very funky top in the same label.. I was hot! Until I got home.
So my then boyfriend horrified at my new look..
mortified I was intending to wear this new found ‘me’ to my cousin’ wedding.. everyone was suitably supportive & loving with their eyes all bright & wide when they greeted me.. I think back now, you know, my uncle had had a good day, he gave me a couple of hundred bucks.. I never really thought about it. Maybe he was so impressed by my styling new look, he was wanting me to find some more of this new, ‘me’… just add the Duran Duran rolled scarf around the forehead..
Somehow, a few days after my new look, these new pants & ‘belt’ I couldn’t find. vanished…! not thinking anymore of it. I got on with my life.. wearing & mixing what I could to find my way through the Madonna.. I went back to buy a skirt to go with the top..
I know, long story.. a sinister twist..
six months later, the midnight blue Hk Holden my Papa had been letting me drive around suddenly had a flat tyre & well look at that.. my new pants.. not so new anymore… under the spare wheel.. Battered & greasy, smelling of car oil, I pinched them out, holding them in the air with one hand & the other on my nose..
So Dad & said boyfriend.. grinning at each other like they had scored a hole in one, had conspired together to hide my new getup.
‘Did you two do this?’, skwarking both in horror at their wilful attempt to debunk me of my new fabulous & joyful wonder that this disheveled foul smelling stench once looked wonderful & like a trust friend at a do
I took my foundling with newly forming holes
to my mother to rebirth for me.. the wondrous remover of all things bad on clothing… especially mine, who thought it was hysterical. Unreal!!! Where is a mullet when you need one?
Did you know about this too?
being young & well teenage demanding.. we need to fix this… Magic Mumma’.. washer extraordinaire.. ‘bright’ no more grease stench…
I wore those pants every day for the next month.. & then for a little while longer till one day I looked in the mirror & said to myself.. what did I buy these things for. I think that woman in the shop was having me on… I kept the belt…
now, I live in that style…. the cut is different a little bit different to what looked like a brightly colored cow udders with feet. . & well I still wear the bra top as a belt..
Heeee!!! Thank you Mandy.. um… really b…..y funny!
Always good for a giggle!
What is narcissism? Is that a way of predicting the future?
??? hey look I have cool emojis … at least that’s something to add to my resume’
I predict the skullet will be in fashion 70s/80s style. No more clone FHM buzz cuts, let the bald grow their hair out wild and free!