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It’s late afternoon in what’s supposed to be spring. Owen Cluer and I walk down a main thoroughfare in downtown Boston after a leisurely stroll through Newbury Comics, just about the hippest joint to buy merch since CBGB’s closed down. Owen’s an old school-chum of mine from Emerson College, where we resided at the Doubletree hotel in the theater district and spent together the most virulent year of our young lives thus far.
As we cross Boylston Street on the way to a Starbucks, I’m deep in thought about the Smiths and Socratic theory, and don’t look up when Owen starts speaking, so I just hear this string of monologue something to the effect of, “Whoa. That guy’s jacket is cool. I like his style. I wonder where he got it…Oh…Oh, he’s reaching into a trash can…Yeah…Yeah, that guy is a hobo.”
Owen and I are lower-echelon members of the international cult known as the indie movement. High ranking members include every A-list star from Lindsey to Brad, all of whom dress bohemian-chic; Kanye’s signature shutter shades are a staple of hardcore scenesters; and everything has to be expensive, rare, and/or vintage. Secret meetings are held under the ruse of shopping at the Garment District. Instead of tattoos or gang colors, we wear afghans and Ray Bans. We know an inordinate number of B-movies, have congenial relationships with multiple drug dealers and buskers about town, and were fans of the new band on the cover of Spin before they came out with an album. We are the love children of 90s slackers and the Cure’s roadies. If you asked us, we wouldn’t have a clue what you’re talking about, because our most essential common quality is that we have no essential common qualities, that we’re all – supposedly – so different.
The most concentrated array of hipsters that I’m aware of is at Emerson College. The student body at Emerson has an average male hair length of really long, and the front doors hold the Guinness World Record for second-hand spliff smoke. The Princeton Review has it rated as number one in the Gay Community Accepted category, number six in Least Religious Students, and characterizes “Emerson students as the artsy young adults with an offbeat fashion forward style and a cigarette in one hand and Starbucks in the other,” in its Emerson Students Say… section. And I distinctly remember it being high in the Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians category when I was applying.
While mohawked Emerson film student Charlie Veto laments that he “heard one person remark that an anomaly is to see an Emerson guy not wearing skinny jeans,” students like Owen have a positive take on Emerson’s alternative quality: “The students there showed me that the coolest or hippest thing you can do was to follow the beat of your own drum.”
Emerson boasts its WERS as being the number one college radio station in America, and college radio provides the best example of how liberal arts colleges like Emerson can influence international style. Not only are college students the next generation of adults, it’s now well known how Nirvana became the preeminent band of its generation due to the popularity of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That single was introduced to the public via college radio and culminated in Kurt Cobain’s idolization, as well as the presence of Cobain’s signature flannel shirts on Paris runways. Since then, “college rock” has become “alt rock,” which have become what most people usually refer to as “rock.” The same microcosmic effect has begun anew, except this time the collegiate populace is on the receiving end of a massive cultural revolution in fashion, music, and philosophy: indie.
But indie did not float down from the sky and land gingerly on the innocent heads of Emerson undergrads the moment they opened their acceptance letters. As Alex Sweterlisch, an upcoming character in this story, will tell you, “Boston’s like a European country where everything’s ten years behind.” Hipsters owe their homage to the motherland of scene, the birthplace of the Velvet Underground and the Strokes and everything in between, and this is where I must begin my investigation: New York City.
Nelson Santovenia, a sophomore at Parsons, the New School for Design, in Greenwich Village, instructed me to wear all black, but when he opens the door he’s in an oversized crayon-yellow t-shirt and tight black jeans. His shiny hair flows down past his ears to join with his six o’clock shadow and bright smile that almost out-louds his shirt. His friends are all with me in wearing black: Alex (the boy kind), Juan, and Cara, the design students; Laura, the model; and untold others who don’t leave the other room of Alex’s nice, albeit claustrophobic, East Village apartment.
I’ve come to New York specifically to go out with Nelson tonight: I’m aware of his lifestyle and I’ve heard he’s achieved a measure of affluence in the City. Monday nights after class he and his friends go to Ella’s Monday night parties; Tuesdays to Kingswood in the West Village or Greenhouse in SoHo; Wednesdays to Lit or Kane or Bijou; Thursdays sleep till 3:30 because class before clubbing was eleven hours long yesterday, then to 205 or, his favorite but one that’s been temporarily closed by the city, Beatrice; Fridays, like tonight, they hit up Ruff or Mr. West; Saturdays to Le Royale; Sundays they sleep in. Well, brunch at Gold Bar, if that counts. All in the East Village, West Village, or downtown. All holes in the wall, and if not, “10th avenue clubs,” a.k.a., “Miami clubs.”
I ask him when he designs. After pausing for thought as if he’d never considered it before, he says, “Anytime between three…” then trails off until one of the others distracts him. Well, he must get it done some time, because Nelson’s done extremely well for himself in the not-yet-two years since he was studying art in Miami at the high school where I studied drama. So well, in fact, that he’s starting his own company very soon and has amassed a small following of admirers in the City. Plus, as he says, “I go out every night. That’s an achievement in itself.”
Nelson, as a Creator of sorts who will one day design what Owen’s children will wear, would seem to be the expert on how fashion trends go from ideas within his head to near-arbitrary physical purchases by the patrons of Newbury Street. Yet he doesn’t seem that interested in explaining any of it to me. Or anything at all, really. It figures, though, doesn’t it? If he cared, then we wouldn’t.
“Hip steps back,” says John Leland in his book Hip: The History. “Hip is a convenient excuse for fuckups.... It becomes its antithesis if made to work too hard.” And as Chuck Klosterman writes in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, “If cool was a color, it would be black – and Billy Joel would be a sort of burnt orange,” because, he says, Billy Joel tries way too hard to be cool, and cool doesn’t try. Cool “steps back.”
That’s why no one has to ask for a legitimate explanation of why Alex thinks, “Birkenstocks are for lesbians,” or why Cara doesn’t even think “Birkenstocks are allowed in New York.” They’re in all black, so they may as well be demigods. And I will never own Birkenstocks now.
Tonight, we walk about ten blocks through Manhattan to Ruff. As Alex asks to confirm, it’s got a decent gay ratio. I’m in the right place.
These days, fashion seeps down a network of rivers from all over the world into the delta that is New York. From there, it’s sling-shot to Hollywood and rebounds to every other major American city as if LA were a pretty third grade teacher handing out old Halloween candy on the last day of class in June. But back in the ‘60s, California was far ahead, according to Tom Wolfe. Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968, a year in which, he says, the hippie scene in San Francisco was already dead. By then, Haight-Ashbury and its colorful inhabitants had become a wild publicity magnet: “The action – meaning the cliques that set the original tone – the action was all over in Haight-Ashbury. Pretty soon all the bellwethers of a successful bohemia would be there, too…the tour buses going through ‘and here…Home of the Hippies…there’s one there’…The whole old-style hip life – jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam – it was all suddenly dying….”
And so it is with Greenwich Village. I dare say the Village is a no more liberal image of America than, say, Pittsburgh or Cleveland. The row of white tents that line a playground, each with its own assortments of “alternative” goods such as fresh-pressed apple cider and the stacked hides of a few small woodland creatures is more than balanced out by the considerable line at McDonald’s, almost the length of the line outside the US Marine Corps Career Center: thirty or so strapping – and not so strapping – men standing young and restless, hot and impatient, but more gung ho about the forms in their hands than I know I’ve ever felt about any form I’ve had to fill out. Greenwich Village, while inherently lacking New York City’s claustrophobic attribute, is equally wanting in any hipsters anywhere in view.
The morning after my adventure in fashionista-ville, without having slept a wink, I set off from a Dunkin Donuts sipping the most vile coffee known to free men and with one of Elton John’s ‘80s songs ringing in my head like a gaudy gay men’s choir rendition of La Cage aux Folles. No longer the sordid city of smoke rippling with chiaroscuro, sunrise has tamed the Gothic beast. Am I still in the big apple? The last time I saw a billboard was that giant, sexy woman five stories above me an hour ago, wanting me – so badly – to shop at Armani Express. Yes, the Village has succumbed to its potential wealth, but I am under-whelmed at the commercial presence around me. It’s the most pristine industrial area I’ve ever seen: skyline/bay to my right, warehouses/cobblestones to my left. Like hipsterdom itself, still relevant but cashed in on by the mainstream.
Aside from the merriment in Washington Square, which serves as more of a quad for the NYU campus, the only hint of screaming hip I can find is a shop in SoHo called Aloha Rag. It recalls something of a small H&M while emitting the minimalist aesthetic of an Apple Store. Somehow, I would think smallness and minimalism is not a great match in the pursuit of customers. In the display there’s an array of Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars. Not just worn out Chucks, mind you, but soiled worn out Chucks. They’re probably worth more than the soiled worn out left half of my body, to say the least of the right half.
“The shoe,” Owen later elucidates, has “basically become the unified fashion statement of the indie movement. Everyone at Emerson has Converse. It’s a fact.” At some point, Owen decided to find a pair that matched him, too. “I wanted to become a card-carrying member of the indie movement. So the place I hit up first is, of course, Indie Corp’s ‘HQ’, Urban Outfitters.” Owen finds the “perfect Chuck,” and when he comes back to buy it the next day, they’ve discontinued that design. “I still know the technical name for it: Chuck Taylor low-top double upper plaid/olive.” Tragic.
Perhaps Owen’s vain pursuit of a definitive indie membership card, and my fruitless trek down Greenwich Street – which runs directly through its eponymous Village as well as SoHo and Tribeca – very much epitomize indie’s inherent elusiveness. “I’m still not sure what the standard definition of [hipster] is,” says Charlie. And he’s not alone. A recent article on the Huffington Post begins, “I know I am not a hipster. I have spent the spring in San Francisco and the summer in Manhattan, two hipster hotspots. I shop at American Apparel, have an Apple computer, avoid Starbucks and other corporate conglomerate coffee, smoothie, and frozen yogurt places, and consider myself ‘unique,’ but I assure you I’m not a hipster. I don’t think I know any hipsters, I don’t even understand hipsters.” The author, Julia Plevin, claims not to know what a hipster is, but goes on to set fixed characterizations upon them: they “are ‘geniuses’ at the Apple Store in San Francisco, attend concerts in empty pools in Brooklyn, and wear tight jeans and converse sneakers.”
Dustin Hennessey, who attends Emerson for screenwriting, tends to wear a post boy hat. He likes Guy Ritchie films and Chuck Palahniuk novels. His comment on Emerson style is as follows: “Style at Emerson has the catalyst capacity of a wet match in a vacuum. The hipster pretentious head-up-their-asses run around with the statement of how original they are, when each one wears tight jeans and stupid shirts.” So, for Dustin, hip is a fashion statement, while for Plevin, it’s also a way of life. Although “tight jeans” seems to be a consensus, everyone has their own definition of what a hipster is – and why, somehow, they’re not one of them.
Plevin herself says that alleged hipsters tend to get “really offended and defensive when they are called a hipster,” but unless I missed the tongue in her cheek, she’s all too quick to hope that hipsters “stop complaining and do something worthwhile for society.” Maybe when they do, she’ll mysteriously find herself no longer avoiding conglomerate beverage establishments.
I accept my unguided failure at the Village and catch the train to Grand Central to meet Owen, who’s joining me from Connecticut, so that we can neighborhood-hop for a few more hours. Little do I know, my disappointment in New York’s legendry is about to come to a spectacular end in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Leland writes, “What’s in Williamsburg today will be in the mall tomorrow.” He frequently refers to it as if it’s the center of the world as far as vogue is concerned. Yet for a while, we meander through Hispanic territory strongly reminiscent of my hometown Miami, which strongly suggests I’ve hit another dead end. Miami is many things, but picturesque Latin adobes do not a Bohemia make. Sure, there are pockets of hip here and there: I take a few notes about an indie video store run by chulos that smelled like vanilla gelato, of which Owen remarks, “Those movies were in no order I could discern.” We also pass possibly the swankiest barbershop and bike shop I’ve ever seen, both filled with pastels and neons amid Williamsburg’s otherwise manila townscape.
But then, as we search exhaustedly for the train station to leave, carrying between us pineapple juice, coconut juice, grape soda, passion fruit juice, Yoohoo, and energy tea (we weren’t hungry, just very dehydrated), we stumble across the Times-Square-for-cool-people. All of a sudden, miles and miles away from any colleges, let alone college towns, we were surrounded by the hippest collection of 20-somethings this side of Amsterdam. Here I stopped taking notes and just reveled with my people, wandering – gaping – in and out of tiny music shops, past film shoots and electric sitars, in through juice bars and out through the New Age shops they led into.
In one of the tiny vintage bookstores they were selling black and white copies of Butt Magazine, “the Homo Quarterly,” and I took great pleasure in identifying the short Hispanic guy whose bare cheeks graced half the cover page: Laura the model’s friend Juan from Alex’s apartment. I guess they really are affluent.
“Everyone in NYC has a Blackberry,” said Nelson the night before, gesturing to a group of girls all individually toying with their Blackberrys. He says everyone at NYU and Parsons is rich. This correlates with the high percentage of Emerson students with the money to wear layers upon layers of thin, useless, and hip-crushingly cool vintage apparel. Charlie also feels the “alternative” nature of Emerson borders on the “more wealthy, I dare say preppy.”
“In its emphasis on being watched,” writes Leland, “[Hip] anticipated the modern media landscape, which values people not for what they produce or possess but for their salience as images. For all its professed disregard for wealth, hip would not have thrived unless it was turning a profit.”
It would seem hip therefore contradicts itself. Owen wants to look like a bum, but to really do it right he would need $800 for that raggedy leather jacket at Nordstrom and $1200 for those faded jeans on Madison Avenue. Pop culture’s present parlance is sarcastic by nature, and fashion has become paradoxical in every way it can think of: metrosexual and indifferent, ragged and pricey.
Cleverly, the neo-post-everything generation has retained its dignity by utilizing a self-awareness not to be found in any youth movement before it. Corporations have been capitalizing on every counterculture since the ‘20s, so this most cynical of countercultures has elected to embrace the inevitable capitalization of counterculture, countering the capitalization by capitalizing on their own counter-capitalization themselves!
Williamsburg knows it’s cool, that everything it does will send shockwaves through the global psyche. So, why not take advantage of it instead of trying to stick it to the man, like those before us? First of all, the man’s not cool, and therefore not worth our time.
2006 found Urban Outfitters on Fortune’s Fastest Growing Companies in America, and in 2007 American Apparel was on Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. So, let the man propagate paint-it-yourself Obama action figures and overpriced plain white T’s: we’ll buy it because we want it, and they’ll make it because we’ll buy it. Capitalism at its most satisfied, finally without needing to worry about its children becoming its own enemies – and this in the Second Great Depression.
As I accompany Owen back to Grand Central after another unrewarding hike down Greenwich Street (just to make sure I wasn’t missing much that morning), I can’t help but feel like we both have found something today. I don’t think Owen’s ever going to stop admiring that bum’s jacket, but I do think we can both allow him to live it down. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop wandering into Urban Outfitter’s and flipping through novelty picture books I know I’ll never actually purchase, but now I think I understand the impulse a little better.
Yes, I’m entertained by marijuana anecdotes. Yes, I think aviators look good on almost everyone. But now I know it’s not just me. Now we both know we’re not alone. And even if we never end up renting a flat in Williamsburg together to soak up the cool on the sidewalks outside, we know our Mecca, and we don’t mind saying it with too-colorful, fishnet-lined windbreakers, plaid post boy caps, great big headphones around our necks, and insolent smirks on our faces. We’re the neo-post-everything, so who cares? Not us.
