How the hipster economy went mainstream

0:27It's Andrea here with Emily and you're listening to The Culture Journalist. We're back with just one more free episode before we retreat behind the scenes for a little to cook up our next batch for you. However, we will still be releasing some paid subscriber-only episodes during that time. So if you want to get in on that, you can head over to our sub stack at theculturejournalist.substack.com and sign up for a paid subscription. That's just five bucks a month. So Emily, what do you think of when you hear the word hipster? I think about this quite a lot. So I think of a couple different things.

1:05I know that the term originated a long time ago, like back in like the 1940s, 1950s with like Black countercultures and jazz culture, and that it was later kind of co-opted by majority white, upper middle class, creative class people more in like our lifetime. But yeah, like I think of the second version of it as a subculture that originated kind of in like the late 90s, early 2000s in cities with kind of a reverse white flight of young artists and creative people moving back into cities and sort of people who define themselves based on their taste in opposition to the mainstream, but who are sort of hopelessly tied to the systems that they are ostensibly rebelling against because it's fundamentally a consumerist culture.

1:58I guess that's kind of how I think of it. To me, it's very aesthetic, but it's also very much like an attitude. You know, the one term that definitely comes to mind is like into X before it was cool. You know, my brain immediately associates like the year 2008 with the word hipster. in the pinterest board of my mind's eye it makes me think of like american apparel and craft beer and beards and bangs and smoking like parliaments and skinny jeans and listening to vinyl for the feel of it totally and i feel like there were different eras of it even within what people think of as the hipster era but it's like very hard to say like what the core of hipsterism is because it was always in the process of getting commercialized it's all about like losing your edge and like finding out about things before other people do and then everybody else finds out about it or it ends up in like a big department store and then you move on to the next thing it's almost kind of saying it's like more in perpetual self-definition of what it's not you know and hipsters, whether they can still be said to exist as a subculture at all at this point, you know, famously like denying that they are in fact hipsters, right?

3:19That's almost kind of a defining trait of them. And you could say that the figure of the hipster has become this sort of like nebulous cash all for all the things that we love to hate about the 21st century liberal arts educated neighborhood gentrifying creative class. You can check out Brad Trammell's excellent recent hipster report for more on that tip. But you can't really study a group that doesn't identify as such, right? No, totally. Although I once met somebody who did identify positively as a hipster. Wow. But anyway, partly for this reason, how hard it is to define this, today's guest, Alessandro Garosa, just published a book examining hipsterism from a different and potentially more useful angle.

4:06It's called The Hipster Economy, Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism. And it's a fascinating look at hipsterism, not as a subculture, but as an economic phenomenon. And not just that, but as something he is calling a dominant, quote, aesthetic regime of consumption in our time. So perhaps you think of the hipster, at least in the early 2000s sense as someone who's obsessed with consuming the right quote-unquote cultural goods, objects that stand out for their authenticity and distinctiveness, and in the process sort of magically endow their owner with those same qualities. Well, Alessandra's book argues that that's pretty much all of us nowadays, at least in the global north.

4:52It's why when we go to the supermarket, we'll choose a brand of crackers with artisanal branding and the words all-natural over a more generic-looking one, even if we know that they're all mass-produced in factories by the same handful of giant corporations. But Alessandro also looks at the hipster economy from the perspective of production, drawing on his study of cocktail bar owners, food truck restaurateurs, and other neocraft entrepreneurs to show how, at bottom, the hipster economy is driven by a centuries-old impulse to carve out spaces of autonomy and self-determination within industrial capitalism.

5:31So Alessandro, who is a researcher in sociology at the University of Milan, joins us to discuss the surprisingly long history of our cultural obsession with the idea of authenticity and how hipster taste is a complex interplay between authenticity and kitsch. We also get into how Fordism and mass production laid the foundation for the hipster economy, the impact of the hipster economy on cities, and how hipsterism isn't just a reaction to the dominant culture, but also a reaction to the state of work. We'll get into all that and more with Alessandro just after the break.

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7:08Hey guys, we are back with Alessandro Giroza. He's a researcher in sociology at the University of Milan. Alessandro, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. So we love the book. How did you end up writing a book about hipster culture? You did say in the book that you actually kind of set out to write about something else. Yes. I was a young PhD student at the time. And so I was very fascinated by the world of high-tech startups. I wanted to study the forefront of capitalism and especially the narratives that were being employed in the Silicon Valley, in the startup economy to frame themselves.

7:53But naturally, being a PhD student in Milan, in Italy, I also wanted to do a research on what was happening in Milan. And what I found pretty interesting was that there was a strange coincidence. At the same time, the municipality of Milan was financing a lot of projects to support young entrepreneurs and highly innovative startups. But then when I went looking into them, actually, what they were financing, what they were supporting were a new street food vendor or a corner shop or a restaurant. And that's when my sociological instinct told me, okay, this is something interesting. And this is when I started to notice how these kind of businesses were popping up everywhere in Milan, especially in some neighborhoods, but quite everywhere.

8:49and how the same phenomenon in Milan was also happening elsewhere. And how these kind of businesses, some way, shared a very similar kind of narrative about being part of the creative economy with high-tech startups, even if they were very different in their nature. Because here we weren't talking about algorithms, big data, high-tech disruption, but we were talking of gourmet hamburgers or coffee, roasted coffee or artisanal food. And so I decided, even if at the first I was a little bit, you know, scared, okay, because high-tech startups are much more fancy apparently than this, but I noticed something interesting was happening there and I wanted to deepen.

9:38Why? more and more people, more and more young people in their 30s especially, but also in their 20s, were deciding to open these kind of businesses that for many reasons could be considered outdated or out of fashion because they're very manual jobs. And so the journey started. Yeah, I guess in the book you call them neocraft industries, like people reviving older methods of food or drink production, cocktail bars. You have a really great passage at the very beginning of the book where you juxtapose three different artisan cocktail makers, bartenders. And there's one in Italy, one in Japan, and one in New York City.

10:26And the narratives are all very, very similar. It reminded me, actually, we mentioned earlier before we started recording, Kyle Chayka's book that we had him on the pod to talk about. And his book includes something similar about coffee shops, how everywhere in the world coffee shops now look alike. Absolutely. I've also been very fascinated by that book because that book analyzed it from the point of view of social media, how social media and digital culture contributed to this. In my book, I analyze the same phenomena, but from the point of view of taste and the evolution of taste and how the evolution of taste relates with wider capitalist transformations.

11:06And absolutely, what we observed is that on one side, this new hipster economy predicates being unique, predicates to be distinctive from anything else. all the neocraft entrepreneurs that I interviewed, when they had to define themselves by opposition to their traditional counterparts, to traditional bars or traditional restaurants, they were telling me, you know, they are copycats. You can't distinguish one from the others. While our places have a unique soul, they reflect ourselves as individuals. They reflect our passions. For customers, it's the same. We go to these places because we can have a unique, consuming experience.

11:52But at the same time, overall, the aesthetic is the same. I'm often joking that if you are in a random hipster neighborhood in a city of the global north, and you are abducted by an alien spaceship and put down in another totally different city, but always in a hipster neighborhood, you will probably not even notice the difference because they start to resemble all the same. And sometimes it's very difficult to distinguish between them because the aesthetic is so similar. And this is part of one of the tensions of the hipster economy. And this is the reason why I argue that, yes, there is this push to feel unique and authentic and distinctive.

12:40But this is a paradigm that has become overwhelming and is absolutely everywhere in the global north. And so the effect is that you feel to be in the same place, no matter in which different city you are. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, this is, it's so interesting. This has so much overlap with what Kyle Chayka is talking about. It's just kind of like a weird cultural dog whistle that doesn't actually have any kind of concrete substance to it necessarily. Which turns to my next question, which is, there really isn't any widely agreed upon definition of the term hipster, right? and of course, hipsters famously love to deny that they are in fact hipsters.

13:22How did you choose to define the term for the purposes of your book? I mean, from this point of view, the title of my book can be a little bit of a disguise because I talk about the hipster economy, but actually this is not a book about hipsters as the stereotypical figure that we have been aware of from, I don't know, Vice articles or magazine articles. This is actually a book about all of us, if with us we mean a broadly-meant middle or lower middle class in the global north. So basically, one of the goals of my book is to vreck a little bit all the debate on how can we define the hipsters if the hipsters are those who don't define themselves as hipsters.

14:15Because naturally, it's very difficult to speak of a subculture if you're looking at people who refuse to be considered as such. A collective identity is one of the very basic prerequisites for a subculture. But we should look at hipsterism as a general and diffused paradigm or attitude or ethos, how you want to call it, of consumption. You know, the stereotypical hipster was just, I argue, the purest manifestation of this paradigm of consumption based on authenticity and distinctiveness. But actually, it wasn't so much relevant by itself as a stereotypical figure. What is relevant as a social phenomenon for the comprehension of our society and of how taste is evolving is to look, is to understand how hipsterism has become such a widespread and pervasive gravitational force orienting our consumption in our everyday life of hundreds of thousands of millions and millions and millions of people.

15:24In the global north, and not only in the global north, in the beginning, in the opening of my book, I also make an example from Tokyo, as I could have made from Mumbai or other global cities in the global South. Yeah, I think especially with the phenomenon of, you know, digital nomads. Have you read a little bit about digital nomadism? Yes. Yeah, I feel like it's everywhere now. And people from the global North are specifically moving into the global South to take advantage of lower cost of living during the pandemic. And then there's like, you know, the first thing that pops up is one of these coffee shops.

16:02Can you give us a short history of where hipsterism comes from? Personally, what I always understood was that the term hipster originated in the 1940s out of Black communities. It's a Black subcultural community in the United States that was then obviously appropriated by a lot of middle class white people. Yeah, I mean, one of my passions is history. I mean, to be absolutely honest with you, I always wanted to be a historian in my life, but then I ended up being a sociologist. And so what I do is to include history in everything I do, because I love going into the depths of the phenomenon. Now, you're right, saying that the first time that hipsters emerged under this label, it was the 40s, inside the Afro-American community.

16:58And this is interesting because it gives the idea of how this ethos was at the beginning at the intersection between matters of aesthetic and style and more political matters. Because when we talk of the Afro-American community in the 40s, we're talking naturally of a community which is suffering, you know, very deep forms of oppression on all the sides. So the idea of vindicating an aesthetic which was distinctive for them was a way for them to say, no, we Afro-Americans are capable of possessing a distinctive style. We're capable of cultural sophistication. And this was radically against the WASP American societies of the 40s.

17:53It was an act of rebellion against that. This is the first time that the hipster label emerged, and it emerged in the United States. More broadly speaking, if we don't stop ourselves to the exact label, but we go deeper, actually, we can see that if we say hip, we immediately recall a wider idea of being alternative to the mainstream, to be rebels. And this idea actually of being hip is actually rooted way deeper in Western history. What I do in my book is to actually argue, I will not naturally go into that in detail, so otherwise we will take some hours, but I argue is something, this idea of having some way of a call, a return to nature against the alienation of the industrial society and of capitalism is something which accompanied Western societies from the very birth of the industrialization in the 18th century, at least from Jean-Jacques Rousseau onwards.

19:04So when we're talking of hip and of hipsterism, we're actually talking of the most recent manifestation of a very deep aesthetic and orientation and idea of rebelling against the alienation of industrial life that has accompanied humans from some centuries. Yeah, you talk about especially this interest in authenticity as a value to strive for, as being something that emerges with, I don't know if it emerges with them, but it's associated with romantic movements and schools of thought. Yes, yes. I mean, that's why, you know, authenticity has been called to be, you know, a hoax because it is almost an empty signifier.

19:50it can mean anything and the opposite of it. But I think it's still useful to employ it, because again, it refers to this fundamental instinct of human beings and of people in front of the alienation of the industrial society and or of capitalist society. And that's why it's also very ambiguous, because naturally, it changes over time. How the aspiration to authenticity is expressed changes if we look at the 18th century and then on the 19th century and then to today. But the fundamental aspiration remains the same. And this is why also in the recent years we have observed, for example, the resurgence of something that we thought was absolutely forgotten by history or as artisanal products and the consumption of artisanal goods.

20:47Totally. I don't remember the exact phrase that you use, but you say something about this idea of finding an existence within the cracks of industrial culture or kind of carving out something that is slightly outside of it, but within it. Yes, yes. I mean, I have to admit, I don't remember the exact words either. I have a terrible memory. But absolutely, yes, you know, this is the idea. And naturally, You know, sometimes I thought that probably it would have been much easier for me to write a book all in black and white. A book in which I would argue, in this book, I will tell you why hipsters are going to save the world.

21:29Or the opposite. In this book, I'm going to tell you why hipsters are ruining the world. But actually, what I was interested in showing is how people, everyday people in their everyday life, try to find their own way to have an acceptable life and to find a satisfying life. Naturally, with a lot of contradictions, with a lot of tensions, because we all live in a complex world full of contradictions and of tensions. But that's why, you know, the ideal of authenticity has remained. Didn't you say in the book also that some of our understanding of authenticity was even imported? It was like romantic thinkers looking at indigenous American interpretations of the Western colonizers.

22:27Yes, this is actually, I'm not arguing it. Naturally, that would have implied too much historical research on my behalf. But that's actually something that is included in the latest book by Graeber and Wengrot, in which they show and they demonstrate how the ideas of individual freedom and what we can call authenticity today in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in that generation of European philosophers and thinkers, actually derived a lot from these short books that were compiled by missionaries in the 16th and in the 17th century interviewing American indigenous leaders. Naturally, historians argue a lot if these interviews were honest, were real, or if they were invented by the missionaries.

23:26But still, this is very indicative of how these ideals even predates the industrialization and were already rooted in the European societies, a society of the 16th century. And the key elements of the critiques advanced by the real or imaginary Native American leaders in these books are basically the same fundamental ones of today. Monet. Monet as the origin of individuals' alienation. That's the same that Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then Karl Marx argued, for example. And the alienation of urban life that was starting to develop in these centuries and so on. So yes, again, very deep roots. If we look at history, we discover many more continuities that we will think if we just look at the manifestation of just the hipster economy that has become ubiquitous in the last 20 years.

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24:59Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, so many people think of hipster culture as a subculture that emerged, you know, in the late 20th century, sort of peaked in the 2000s with like Vice and American Apparel and then kind of faded into irrelevance once our relationship to culture got more mediated by social media and streaming and all that. However, you argue that hipsterism as an aesthetic regime of consumption has reached that go back much farther. Can you talk a little bit about the transition from Fordism to post Fordism and how it kind of lays the foundation for the version of the hipster economy that you talk about in this book?

25:39Yes, I would love to. This is where I get into more maybe, you know, academic terms, you know, aesthetic regimes of consumption and Fordism and post-Fordism. But basically, yes, what I argue in the book is that if we want to arrive to the last 50 years, that is when, you know, authenticity has emerged as a mainstream paradigm of consumption. This happened for a couple of contemporary phenomena that emerged in all their strength by the 60s. On one hand, capitalism, mode of production, entered into a crisis. The central decades of the 28th century was the triumph of Fordism. What do we mean by Fordism?

26:25Basically, the dualism composed by standardized mass production for standardized mass consumption. Every family needs a car. Every family needs a washing machine. Every family needs etc. Okay, so this was the epoch of it takes the name from Ford. Because very famously, Ford at the beginning of the 28th century argued, You need a Ford T, just one model, just one color. That's all you need. You need a car. But from the 60s, this model enters into crisis. Well, actually, this model in the US enters into crisis in the 40s. And that's one of the reasons behind the Marshall Plan. Marshall Plan was also a way to ensure that Europe would be a mass market for American products.

27:20And this works. But then into the 60s, also the European market starts to be saturated. Capitalism needs new ways to create new markets. And market segmentation is that way. So from the 60s and the 70s, production starts to be much more flexible and much more personalized than upon the single customers. The other thing which happens in the 60s is naturally the big revolt of the 60s and the 70s, which happened in all the globe, in the capitalist system, but also in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union and under the East European countries, against industrial alienation and against the alienating effects of the industrial society.

28:09And this revolt means a refusal of mass standardized products. So from here, it starts a double movement, a political movement, which sees in individual freedom, freedom from alienation, and so in authentic ways of leading an ideal to achieve. And on the other side, capitalism starts to see authenticity as something that can be used, something that can be employed to make people buy new and different products. And these can be recollected looking at all the most iconic advertising campaigns of major companies along the decades of the 70s, the 80s and the 90s up to arriving to the new millennium.

28:59And so these are the roots of this phenomenon. Looked at from this point of view, what we are observing and witnessing today is just the more mature stage of this process begun in the 60s. Naturally, then the digital society gave a new push towards this phenomenon of personalization, for sure. But still, their roots are all there in the 70s in these double movements. One movement from the top, from the giant monopolist corporations, and one movement from below, from people aspiring to escape from industrial alienation. Yeah, it's really interesting because I feel like that alienation actually sort of became like weaponized and inverted by capitalistic machinations.

29:46And instead, I guess to borrow a term from the sociologist Bourdieu, like they sort of weaponized distinction. They turned this alienation into a need for distinction amidst mass consumption. But that became its own kind of economic driver from these top and bottom forces you were talking about, right? Absolutely, yes. I mean, I absolutely agree. And this is the reason why this phenomenon is full of ambiguities. This new paradigm of consumption is full of ambiguities. It cannot be reduced either to a capitalist hoax and neither can be idealized as a mass revolutionary movement. It's known and both of these things at the same time, precisely because of this weaponization, precisely of these contradictory stances between these two pushes.

30:38You talk about another contradiction in the book, which is how, you know, starting with, I guess, the boomer generation in its revolt in the 60s and 70s against the Fordist regime, they were specifically trying to distinguish themselves from kitsch, like the kitsch of Fordism. Yes. You know, for example, if you think of mass produced goods in the supermarket and all these like innovations that you get after, you know, the Second World War, mass produced food, then all of a sudden it becomes like the first natural eating or the antecedents of whole foods culture or, you know, interest in natural wines become part of, you know, like yuppie culture, boomer yuppie culture, where you sort of start distinguishing yourself through this authentic consumption.

31:28that is different from mass production. But then also you make an interesting point that the distinguish between like authentic and kitsch culture has never been entirely rigid either, that sometimes the authenticity culture ends up borrowing from the kitsch. Like when we talk about 2000s hipster culture or whatever, like that was also a lot of kitsch. Yeah, like the ironic t-shirt movement. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. It's a constant process of dialectics between the two, between the kitsch and the authentic. The authentic needs the kitsch to frame itself as authentic and distinctive from the mainstream.

32:08And the kitsch, in some way, is defined as such by comparison to the authentic. And it's not casual, I think, that both kitsch and hipster have become to acquire a kind of pejorative, negative connotation, because they've been stereotyped. They've both been stereotyped, you know, because fundamentally they express in their purest form two different aesthetics and ethos of consumption, which still are both present in our society. Naturally, to say that we live in a post-40s society, it doesn't mean that mass standardized production is no more here. At the opposite, especially if we look at large companies, at large corporations, we can argue that what they are trying to do is to still produce mass standardized products, but with an aura of authenticity.

33:04When we go to the supermarket, to follow your example, and we see large brands framing their products are biological, authentic, natural, etc., we kind of know it's a lie. We know that many of them are still industrially produced. Still, we kind of like them because if they build their claim properly, we're still going to prefer them to the alternatives because naturally we all want to buy the authentic. But then the kitsch, the industrial product, still has huge advantages in terms of affordability. Totally. Here in the States, I think of, I guess you're not in the States, but Andrea, if you ever walk into like a Target, right?