Hipster

Written by a fictional hipster. Is it sarcastic self-parody, or dead serious?

"Prototypical non-comformist
You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift store Gestapo
You adhere to a set of standards and tastes
that appear to be determined by an unseen panel of hipster judges
Giving a thumbs up or thumbs down
to incoming and outgoing trends and styles of music and art
Go analog, baby
You're so postmodern
You're diving face-forward into an antiquated past
It's disgusting, offensive
Don't stick your nose up at me!"

— Say Anything..., "Admit It!!"

In the 1940s, "hipster" referred to middle-class white people (often Jewish, or at least ambiguously so) who admired the work of and emulated the lifestyles of black jazz musicians. This was, for them, an existentialist rejection of "square" mainstream society. These hipsters were an unorganized movement that eventually morphed into poetry-reading, marijuana-smoking beatniks of the 1950s, and later the psychedelic drug-using, free love-oriented hippies of the 1960s.

Sometime between the late 1990s - early 2000s, the term "hipster" was dusted off and applied to a new generation that expressed the old hipster ideals—specifically rejecting mainstream trends—in new ways: They were now predominantly middle-class or upper-middle class (especially the well-off "trust fund hipster"), college-educated, white 20-something-year-olds. Usually from the Pacific Northwest, New York City, or New England, they retain interest in "alternative" culture: Traits include left-of-center politics; alternative music; independent, cult classic, and foreign films; thrift-store or vintage fashion; Apple products; a diet of locally-grown, organic, or vegetarian/vegan food; and craft beers. Hipsters prefer to live in gentrifying areas where the rents are still somewhat affordable and where there are bars, cafes and stores (namely record stores and vintage clothes stores) catering to their interests.

In The New '10s, self-identified hipsters (if such a thing can even be found, as no one seems willing to call themselves by this name) view themselves as intellectuals who reject the mainstream and carefully define their individual identities, taking a buffet-style approach to elements of other cultures and subcultures. Your typical hipster outfit will appropriate and/or cannibalize elements from the punk, hippie and rave scenes, plus '90s Grunge and modern geek-chic, as well as some token from a non-Western culture (usually Asian or Native American). Lacking the raison d'etre of any of these subcultures, the hipster will instead use an air of sarcasm to tie the ensemble together (the '60s hippie did much the same, only without the irony).

Hipsters' musical tastes are eclectic but generally centered around genres such as Indie Pop, Alternative Hip Hop, Post-Rock and minimalist Techno. Particular bands hipsters tend to enjoy include Belle and Sebastian, Ben Folds, Jens Lekman, Animal Collective, Dr. Dog, Best Coast, and all of the Elephant 6 Collective bands (especially Neutral Milk Hotel). Yet simply knowing these bands is only half the battle, as an obscure and eclectic taste in music is preferred, and much of which is collected on vinyl. Pitchfork, a music blog, is probably the most important hipster tastemaker and gatekeeper of the past decade. It's often joked that this is who Emos turn into when they grow up.

It should be noted that while these bands may be popular among hipsters, this doesn't make the bands themselves 'hipster bands'. Conversely, a nominal 'hipster band' may actually be abandoned by hipsters if it becomes too "mainstream" (Arcade Fire, for instance, were written off by many once they found mainstream popularity from its Grammy wins and soundtrack appearances in movies like Where the Wild Things Are and The Hunger Games). Additionally, a good portion of bands loved by hipsters actively reject the sarcasm, snobbery, and trendiness that often go along with hipster culture. Arcade Fire has been known to throw jabs at hipsters in their songs ("they will eat right out of your hand/using great big words that they don't understand!") and indie folk group Bon Iver outright defied the label by recording an ultra-sincere, proudly cheesy autotuned Power Ballad for their second album.

Politically, the typical hipster will be center-left, being against "big business" and believing strongly in social justice, but still wary of high taxes and, like their fashion and music tastes, taking a mix-and-match approach to political views. This is sometimes flanderized into a politically overcorrect liberal strawman who thinks Everything Is Racist and that everything has political undertones. A more modern example that emerged in the 2010s, inhabiting more or less the same side of the political spectrum but with very different preoccupations, is the self-described socialist who associates themselves with 20th-century left-wing revolutionary imagery and, living in a gentrified neighborhood, fixates on combinations of issues like student debt relief, cannabis legalization, and bringing back rent control that affect people like them—college-educated, middle-class urban residents.

A critical mind might see hipsters as yet another subculture dedicated to individuality that ended up manifesting just as much herd mentality as the mainstream it rejected, with a tendency to act as though popularity and quality are inversely proportional, and to be aggressively smug (read: shamelessly arrogant) about it. This often leads to parodies of hipsters that boil down to one joke-hipsters as hypocrites concerned with making themselves superior by being different.

Due to this strawman, the term "hipster" is frequently used as an insult, lobbed in the direction of anyone deemed pretentious or the slightest bit "artsy." Further confusing the issue, hipsters themselves will, owing to their "indier-than-thou" attitude, frequently disown any hipster fashions or artists that catch on in the mainstream. One year, hipsters may wear distressed, ripped jeans and t-shirts with ironic vintage 1970s logos; the next year, self-professed hipsters will stop wearing those because they're available at every Walmart in America, while the latecomers who start wearing those will still be labeled hipsters by outsiders. This only further contributes to the decay of the label (although the term "scenesters" is sometimes used for these johnny-come-latelies). But the real reason hipsters get so much hate is probably just the perceived smugness.

Spiritual—if not actual—descendant of the Yuppie (albeit with less overt or crass materialism ^note  Whereas a 1980s yuppie would ostentatiously wear Brooks Brothers shirts and Rolex watches to display their wealth and status, a hipster will wear a vintage shirt and carry brand new Mac laptop to display their taste and style. and class anxiety). Also, compare Emo Teen, Beatnik, Granola Girl, New-Age Retro Hippie, Bourgeois Bohemian, Tech Bro. See also Aging Would-Be Hipsters who are characters who either were hip years ago and are now desperately trying to get back into "the scene" (despite having little or no idea of what's going on) or are long-term hipsters who sense the world is drifting away from them.

Related to Irony, Postmodernism, Popularity Polynomial. Often holds the belief that True Art Is Angsty.

Those unfamiliar with subcultural and countercultural movements will often confuse Goth, Punk, Raver and Emo with the Hipster subculture, using "hipster" as a catch-all term for any quirky or alternative music or fashion, including those affiliated with other subcultures. This is a huge, huge Berserk Button for anyone involved in any of the aforementioned alternative subcultures.

See also I Read It for the Articles. Not to be confused with Rule of Cool or Isn't It Ironic? (It is.)

Usually this trope is in opposition to "The Man". Yeah, we just had to point that out.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The Mac guy from the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads is considered by many to be a hipster stereotype. In fact, many people who appear in Apple ads appear to be hipsters. This is likely the result of Apple trying to tell people "Buy a Mac and be a hip counterculture artist rather than a PC using drone."
• The "Don't Be So Mayo"/"We Will Not Tone It Down" ad campaign for Miracle Whip tried to appeal to hipsters and failed. It was brutally roasted by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. Miracle Whip retaliated by showing two response ads during his show.

Anime and Manga

• Pop Team Epic: Among other things, hipsters (known as "subculture bitches") are one of Popuko's many enemies.
  Little Girl: (Playing house) Welcome, welcome!
  Popuko: What shop is this, I wonder?
  Little Girl: A Northern European sundries store that was opened in a room in a retro downtown apartment.
  Popuko: (Pissed) The fuck... did you just say...?

Arts

• "Interior Semiotics" was a bizarre and gross art performance that was greatly associated with hipsters, due to the vast majority attending the exhibit. That is all you need to know.

Comic Books

• In Batgirl #35 Barbara moves to the cool hip area of Gotham. Her friend jokingly warns her not to get run over by a fixie.
• Frank, from The New York Four. That guy knew the greatest underground bands... before you did.
• In Empire State, Jason warns Sara that if she moves to New York City, she's going to be surrounded by annoying hipsters. She moves anyway, and upon speaking to Jimmy again:
  Sara: You were right about the annoying hipsters here, too. The worst are the ones who complain about all the other annoying hipsters while not realizing that they themselves are the annoying hipsters.
• Starman Jack Knight, despite living in the present day, is actually the classic version of a hipster. Somewhat understandable, as he's an antiques dealer in a Retro Art Deco City and the son of a Golden Age superhero.
• The characters of Scott Pilgrim are somewhat hipsterish, although it's more of an Affectionate Parody/criticism toward the lifestyle.
  • More of the villains seem to fit the hipster mold than the sympathetic characters do. Matthew Patel for sure, with his weird fashions and declarations of what is "in" this year. Gideon Gordon Graves clearly aspires to be some sort of hipster king, flaunting his impossibly hip new club and telling Scott he's not cool enough to date Ramona. Scott and his friends, meanwhile, seem to send the message that being honest and true to yourself is the way to be happy in life.
  • Hipsterdom and geekdom is discussed and played with in the comic, the main characters are vaguely nerdy guys and girls that enjoy their lives and defy stereotype of both Hipsters and Nerds (While they like video games, comics and anime, they also go to parties and have relationships which is considered un-geek by the media. They play in a indie band an have certain unusual interests but their tastes are genuine and honest instead of trying to look cool like hipsters do). The villains and antagonists in the other hand are trying too hard to be hip and appear as cool, Envy, for example, rejected her otaku past and adopted the persona of a sexy, mature rocker. Ramona Flowers also exemplifies this, by being a hipsterish woman that doesn't feel bad for hanging out with her much geekier boyfriend and his friends, while Knives is a teenager looking for her identity and tried to be both geek and hipster, she failed in them two. If this comic teaches something is to be yourself, as the most well adjusted characters are cool while the antagonists are just losers pretending to be cool.

Comic Strips

• Bucky sounds like a hipster in this Get Fuzzy strip.
• One Sunday strip of FoxTrot had Jason become a "math hipster", using a slide rule to do math and looking down on Eileen for using a calculator. In turn, Marcus looked down on Jason with his use of an abacus.
• The titular character from Nemi has a history of, among many other hipsterish things, getting herself hired at a music shop, complaining all day long about people's crappy music tastes, and then telling the people who enter the store and request the kinda music that she listens to that they don't have that music on the shelves, purely for the sake of ensuring that her music doesn't go mainstream.

Fan Works

• The Miraculous Ladybug fic Porte-Boner includes an Akuma named The Hipsteur, described as "a man in impossibly skinny jeans, an improbably large handlebar mustache, an incredibly rustic-looking snapback, and seventy or eighty scarves demolishing a McDonald's with a powerful blast of enchanted Pabst Blue Ribbon, and leaving in its wake an artisanal hand-squeezed vegan juice bar," who states that his mission is to "make sure Paris is a city you probably haven't heard of." He proves hilariously easy for Ladybug and Chat Noir to defeat - they spend the whole "battle" having a conversation over coffee while dealing with hangovers, repeatedly distracting him by directing him to record shops, bike shops, internet cafes, etc, before finally distracting him with a coffee (which he actually offers to pay them for) and destroying the akumatized object (a credit card bill addressed to his parents).
• They appear as antagonists in The Great Alicorn Hunt
• The (Edit) War for Ash’s Freedom to not be Betrayed has Hipsters appear to harass Ash as strawmen created by said Edit War. Arceus even wonders if the created Hipsters are the first Hipsters in the Pokemon World.
• One Total Drama fan fiction has Dave excited to receive a new video game console, which the Lemony Narrator helpfully informs us is called "The Hipster 720- you've probably never heard of it before."
• The protagonist of the Harvest Moon fic Do You Believe in Fairies? is a college-aged hipster named Evelyn. After learning she is The Chosen One, she drops out of college to move to rural Harmonica Town.
• Damian calls Conner a hipster as an insult in Teen Titans: Call of Blood, after seeing his street clothes. While Conner is not a perfect portrayal, he admittedly has hipster-like looks (fade haircut, browline glasses, flannel shirt and jeans) and mannerisms (puts Social Media Before Reason, talks like a text message, and likes food with outlandish flavours).
• In Adult Arthur, Kate's grown into a hipster who's trying to become a professional foodie.
• Parodied with Sophie Small in Kedabory's Elmore Chronicles; her interests are almost comically obscure, with such hobbies as listening to a Spanish podcast about llamas and watching a French film from The '90s that was only just dubbed in English.

Films — Live-Action

• Richard Linklater's Slacker is possibly a sociological, non-linear Start of Darkness of the hipster subculture. As a commenter on IMDb once said, "there is ALWAYS going to be 20-year-olds."
• Allison in Yes-Man, if her strange fashion sense, a penchant for indie music and unusual hobbies are any indication. A rare non-satirical example.
• Zooey Deschanel plays a bisexual hipster in Our Idiot Brother.
• In Juno, Juno and her boyfriend are pretty much hipsters, though her friend Leah is only a marginal example. Jason Bateman's character attempts to seduce Juno through their shared appreciation of hipster media.
• Rob, Barry and Dick in High Fidelity think themselves this, with the usual results.
• Pretty much everyone in Les Amours imaginaires (also known as Heartbeats) — basically everyone in all of Xavier Dolan's films, actually.
• In This Is the End, Emma and Craig accuse Jay of being a hipster because of his tight-cuffed pants and his dislike of the Los Angeles lifestyle. They then ask if he hates universally-loved movies like Forrest Gump (which he does admit to hating).
• Played with in Ex Machina. On one hand Nathan is the head of a trendy tech company, follows various health fads, and generally seems to cultivate his own unique lifestyle. However, this is at least partly intentional on Nathan's part. He is intended to represent how powerful tech companies get customers to let their guard down by acting like they're your pal and making you think you're getting to be part of a cool lifestyle, when what they're really doing is taking your money and rifling through your address book.

Jokes

• Two hipsters walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says "Let's get out of here." The second responds, "Yeah, this place is full of hipsters."
• How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? It's an obscure number, you've probably never heard of it.
• How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? You don't know?
• Alternate: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three: the first one screws, the second one takes a photo for Instagram, and the third one writes about it in his blog.
• How many hipsters can you get into a phone booth? One, any more and it would be too mainstream.
• Why did the hipster cross the road? To get to the other Starbucks on the other side.
• If a tree falls in the forest and there's no-one around to hear it — a hipster has bought the soundtrack on limited edition vinyl.
• How much does a hipster weigh? An instagram.
• How do you drown a hipster? Chuck 'em in the mainstream.
• Alternate: Why did the hipster commit suicide in a tributary? It wasn't mainstream yet.
• Why did the hipster drown himself in the ocean? It's deep, you probably wouldn't understand it.
• How did the hipster burn their mouth? They drank their coffee before it was cool.

Live-Action TV

• Portlandia on IFC parodies the lifestyle of hipsters and the older Bourgeois Bohemians but is enjoyed by a large portion of hipsters nonetheless.
• On Selfie, self-obsessed Eliza has her neighbor Bryn, who she calls a "hipster-crite." Bryn dresses in floral prints, runs a book club (in Eliza's words, it's for "adult virgins"), her friends have names like Eyelet and Thistle, makes her own pop tarts, and tends to look down on Eliza (but then again, a lot of other people think she's too shallow/self-centered). Bryn and her girls seem to be a bit romantic at heart, as Bryn audibly gasps when she thinks Henry has come to her apartment for Eliza as a "Jerry Maguire moment"
• Community: Jeff Winger tends to share the role of group hipster with Britta, although he tends to occupy the 'vain, self-centred and desperately obsessed with being seen as the coolest person in the room (while simultaneously desperately obsessed with being seen as aloof and uncaring about being cool)' part of the stereotype, while Britta's more the 'smug, condescending indie-culture left-winger' part. Also mostly-sympathetically-deconstructed, as it's increasingly revealed that this is mainly just a cover for his many neuroses.
• Chris Morris's sitcom Nathan Barley was a satire of London hipsterdom, particularly the title character.
• Happy Endings parodied hipsters in the episode "Dave of the Dead". Penny hooks up with one unknowingly when she meets one at the laundromat and assumes his shabby attire is due to being the last clean clothes he had. Max instructs her in acting the part, by basically not caring about anything. She eventually leaves him because, being a Large Ham, couldn't bear acting aloof all the time. The final scene had hipsters shuffling like zombies toward Dave's food truck.
  • The second-to-last scene features Penny calling out a girl for using a wheelchair as part of her "look." The girl says she is paralyzed. Just as Penny starts apologizing, "Psych. I can totes walk. Sweet chair, though, right?" Penny proceeds to wheel her into something off-screen.
• Namechecked in The Big Bang Theory. While Leonard and Penny try to hang out as Just Friends at a bar Penny strikes up a conversation with a friendly but sardonic guy named Kevin on his laptop, who fits the trope despite comparatively little screentime. Leonard thought she was just trying to make a point to him, but Penny mentions that she found him cute with his "hipster glasses and dorky t-shirt." (While certainly not a hipster, Leonard wears similar glasses and dorky t-shirts)
• A common sketch on You're Skitting Me where the eponymous hipsters take their ideals too far. (e.g. dying in a restaurant of eating raw chicken because they don't want to eat normal chicken)
• Andre from The League is what happens when a hipster becomes needy and desperate rather than smug.
• In the revival series of Doctor Who, the costume theme for each Doctor is (by admission of Word of God) based on a British subculture. The Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, is the Hipster - he dresses in slightly caricatured hipster fashion that also doubles as Awesome Anachronistic Apparel, and is greatly invested in how various extremely lame things make him cool.
• For one Lizzie McGuire episode, Gordo starts acting like this after suddenly becoming obsessed with 50's Lounge music, particularly Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. After Lizzie accidentally popularizes "Rat Pack Culture" with the rest of the school, he quits it in disgust of its new-found popularity. When she and Miranda try to apologize, he blames them for ruining his new interest, calls them "mindless trendoids, following the herd" and leaves them to fly RC planes, a hobby he clearly has no interest in, but puts up with because it's unpopular. He eventually relents when he realizes what a jerk he's being and returns to help them with their Lounge themed school dance, delivering An Aesop that hating something just for its popularity is just as bad as liking it just for its popularity.
• One episode of Schitt's Creek features David Rose's ex-boyfriend Sebastien Raine, a handsome art world hipster who David says will be wearing an expensive sweater that doesn't look expensive. It's clear that Sebastien only slept with David to obtain a show at his gallery, and he has shown up in town in order to humilate David's mother through a Diane Arbus-like photography project. David may have once aspired to be like Sebastien, but he puts a stop to the project by sleeping with Sebastien and stealing the memory card containing the photos.
• Search Party is a black comedy about a group of narcissistic Brooklyn hipsters whose efforts to find out what happened to a missing college acquaintance grow increasingly fraught as they become mired in deceit, conspiracy, back-stabbing, and cover-ups.

Literature

• Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's university thesis paper has the 1800s equivalent of a hipster title: "On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates."
• The main characters of Ben Croshaw's post-apocalyptic novel Jam are being antagonised by a tribe of hipsters lead by a "Lord Awesomo" for a good part of the story. For what reason? Well, because the tribe has decided to be ironically evil. Not being evil is simply too mainstream for them.
• Although the term didn't even exist at the time the story was written, the title character of Enoch Soames fits the trope perfectly. Soames is a wannabee poet and poseur who puts on the airs of being a world weary artist and professes to scorn contemporary and past writers who are highly regarded. Additionally, he's able to pursue poetry as a vocation because he receives an annuity from a wealthy Aunt.

Music

• The main character of The Lonely Island's "I Threw It On The Ground", played by Andy Samberg, appears to be the sort of hipster who rejects everything as "part of the system", and will inevitably respond to basically everything by throwing something on the ground.
• Ben Folds' song "Cooler Than You" is a Take That! to hipsters and their popularity within the subculture.
• Say Anything...'s "Admit It" is a brutal evisceration of hipsterdom.
• "The Life Organic" - Dom and Adrian.
• "Being a Dickhead's Cool" - The Grand Spectaculuar.
• Arcade Fire's The Suburbs mocks hipsters in several songs, most obviously in "Rococo," which is in part about the band's early fanbase abandoning them once they became popular and thus no longer 'cool.' "Month of May" attacks hipstery cynicism and aloofness, and "Sub War" tells a loose story of two friends who become separated when their musical tastes clash (mixed in with a lot of Growing Up Sucks imagery).
• Pop Punk band Patent Pending wrote "All Star Hipster" about, you guessed it!
  There goes that OG sub drifter
  Professional thrifter
  Full-time Craigslister
  He's an All Star Hipster!
• The Smashing Pumpkins' song "Cherub Rock" from their 1993 album Siamese Dream critiques hipster music culture and the "false gods" of the "indie scene". Although some people may not have gathered that the line "Hipsters unite" was meant to be snarky.
• The song "Me gustan las hipsters" (I dig hipster chicks) by the Mexican band Mongosaurio (it’s an obscure band, you have probably never heard of them) has a great Take That!: A hopeless guy with a serious glasses fetish digs hipster chicks, nerd girls that pretend to take heavy drugs and always treat him like crap… because the guy is not interested at all in the hipster subculture. The guy laments his own mediocrity and lack of pretentiousness:
  I know I don't have a chance
  Because I studied accounting
  I don't have a blog or know how to use a Nikon
  I don't play in a band or read Pitchfork
  I don't know a damn thing about design
  And movie theaters make me sleepy.
  And I'm not interesting,
  Or important.
  I dig hipster chiiiiiiiiiiicks!
• The Girls Aloud b-side "Hoxton Heroes" mocks the British indie music scene, specifically the hipsters more obsessed with their images, fame connections, and "scene credibility" with no significant contributions rather than being respectable musicians. For extra irony, Girls Aloud were created on a Talent Show whose output was eventually embraced by the British indie scene.
  So let's try a little bit harder
  Cause you need more than jeans and a parka
  Just cause your dad knew the Rolling Stones
  You've got the Primrose set in your cell phone
  Don't kid yourself, you're an indie clone
  We've seen it before, get a sound of your own
• Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a song entitled "If You're Anxious for to Shine in the High Aesthetic Line", which mercilessly mocks "aesthetes" — a sort of 1890s equivalent of the hipster. One of the reprehensible types of people mentioned in "If Someday It Should Happen (I've Got a Little List)" is "The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/All centuries but this and every country but his own."
• Meg Myers Feat. Dr Rosen Rosen bring us "Tennessee". In the video, the 2 artists run and drive around town assaulting hipsters with a variety of Nerf weapons.
• Dave Frishberg's "I'm Hip" is the great hipster parody of the Beatnik era, a first person account of doing all the cool things and wanting to be seen doing them.
• Don't forget Lil B The BasedGod's song Hipster Girls.
• MC Lars's song "Hipster Girl".
• "That Boy That Girl" by Hadouken! mocks the hipster/indie scene that was popping up in the UK at the time (2006). There was a whole a whole scene sort of analogous to the American Crunkcore scene, of MySpace famous bands merging indie music and electronics, and fans dressing like they were going to a rave (NME labelled the genre "New Rave"). Most of Hadouken!'s early output was basically this but Played for Laughs, and by the time their first album came out in 2008 they'd gotten past it, and most of the new songs on it were serious.
• Kahimi Karie's "Harmony Korine" rails against hipsters.
  Wrapped in a glaze of 100% pure irony
  Sanctified by fashion magazines
  Can't you see they're laughing at you laughing at you laughing at yourself, old man?
• Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" is all about finding hipster vintage clothes at thrift stores and showing them off at a trendy club. It also takes a poke at straw hipsters who buy faux vintage fashions from boutique stores.
  That shirt's hella dough
  And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
• The ill-chosen boyfriend of the narrator of The Doubleclicks’ "Ironically" turns out only to love her geekiness “ironically”. It’s a Break Up Song.
• The AJR x Daisy the Great song "Record Player" uses hipster culture as a means of exploring life and keeping things interesting just to prove that you're not stuck in a rut. The chorus that plays throughout the song speaks the most about it.
  I've got a record player that was made in 2014.
  Dyed my hair blue, it came out a seasick sort of green.
  I like vintage dresses when they fall just below my knees.
  I pretend I scraped them climbing in the trees.

Professional Wrestling

• Bobby Fish, well known for trolling his opponents, developed an increasingly hipster like persona in Ring of Honor in an effort to also troll the audience. Particularly the self defined identity and sarcasm parts.
• The SMS Power Stable of Austraila's PWA includes InstaGraham, SnapChad, and FaceBrooke the hipster luchadors who embrace social media websites to promote shows but reject the self absorbed nature of the platforms by wearing masks. Stablemate Unsocial Jordan looks more like a "traditional" 2010s hipster and is rather sarcastic and demeaning but he also tends to put himself, is usually jokingly friendly with his jabs and generally more likely to be a straight baby face. Considering he actively promotes non SMS members "Unsocial" itself became an ironic artifact.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Dan Cummins has some not-very-nice but funny things to say about hipsters in this bit. Funnily enough, an audience member calls out the subject at the same time Dan names it, going only off him remarking that the particular group irritates him.
• When commenting on the existence of The Spam Museum, Patton Oswalt jokes about how he'd love to be their first sincere patron, theorizing that the staff would practically worship him since the only people who'd normally ever visit the place would have to be hipsters who were doing it ironically.
  • He has a routine where he names the official hipster uniform as the Glurgest t-shirt imaginable, where the wearer's inherent coolness negates the lameness of the shirt.

Tabletop Games

• Steve Jackson Games' Hipster Dice. Slogan "You've probably never heard of it". Supposedly based on the underground German game Nichteinechteswürfelspiel^note "Not a real dice game" and "updated with vintage rules".

Video Games

• This kind of personality is parodied in Animal Crossing: New Leaf of all places. One of the new personality types that can move into your town are known as "Smug". These kind of villagers are males villagers who talk about how suave and stylish they are, often try to hit on female and male players and how they're into obscure kinds of music (and 8-bit chiptunes "because those are glorious") and other geeky things like trains and anime. However, they rather would be called "enthusiasts". They also complain about how they don't have a favorite TV show anymore because whenever they get into one, the network cancels it.
• Micah in Crown Delights Deli is a hipster with the typical artisan look who becomes one of your regulars at the bodega. He starts out asking you for a kombucha and some Spanish lessons, to your confusion, but with the right choices, you eventually warm up to him.
• In Dream Daddy, Mat is a standard one; he has plenty of tattoos, works in a coffee shop and likes a large amount of alternative bands. During the BBQ, he wears a flower crown his daughter made him and has a conversation with Hugo about art history.
• In Fossil Fighters: Champions, the Terrible Trio is these shunned for their Embarrassing Hobbies. They're eventually made sympathetic by the end - they only fell in with the supposed bad guy because he's the only one who treated them decently - but Cole the hipster is still the target of more mockery than the other two (a metalhead and a hippie, for the record).
• Since the Grand Theft Auto games also serve as social commentary on the period each game is set in, it's pretty inevitable that the IV saga and V (both set during the turn of the 2010s, during which the hipster subculture as known today would emerge) would ruthlessly parody this trope.
  • In IV, there is Radio Broker, an alternative rock station catering to hipsters, while its DJ, Juliette Lewis (as herself), snarks about the particular subculture and their tendency to reject things that have gone mainstream. There are also news reports about them starting to flood the suburbs around Liberty City, indirectly causing taxi fare hikes (because, according to the drivers, they can't distinguish real beggars from well-to-do street-people-wannabes).
  • In V:
    • Radio Mirror Park is Los Santos' analogue to Radio Broker.
    • One of Trevor's Berserk Buttons is being called one. Michael properly analyzes his life style— living out in the sticks away from the coffee shops and bankers, defying any sort of labels from others, wearing what he wants because he doesn't care, his taste in music and tattoos, saying how hipsters love to hate on other hipsters— he mocks him for living like a hipster, going so far as to call him a "proto-hipster" and exactly the kind of person that all hipsters aspire to be. Michael posits that when his neighborhood becomes gentrified, then Trevor will move somewhere else and start the cycle all over again. One of Trevor's Rampage missions sees him slaughtering a horde of hipsters.
    • Grand Theft Auto Online released the "I'm Not a Hipster" update in July 2014, adding several hipster-themed clothes and vintage cars.
• Hitman (2016) has Jordan Cross, lead singer of indie band The Class, who has the dress sense, beard, manbun haircut, and veganism of a typical hipster. This being Hitman, it's down to 47 to ensure he joins the infamous 27 Club.
• In the office simulator in Job Simulator, you can hire "Hipster Bot". He wears glasses, founded Font Snob Club, and has worked at a grape juice brewery.
• In Kitty Powers' Matchmaker, one of ten Types of clients is this. Hipsters usually wear their hair in a bun, have small beards and/or mustaches, and wear narrow glasses and high-class outfits. They typically like avant-garde art, artisan coffee, and activities related to activism.
• In Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry, most characters (excepting The Bartender and the time-shifted protagonist) are hipsters. Becky, an alcohol connoisseur whose quest for Instacrap fame leads her to drink a Gargle Blaster, gets the most savage commentary from a game that's primarily an Affectionate Parody.
• Max Caulfield in Life Is Strange is mocked for being a hipster, something she agrees with somewhat. She talks about raiding a thrift store for a new wardrobe for school, watches not-mainstream-but-not-really-obscure movies like AKIRA and Cannibal Holocaust, and her playlist seems to consist only of slow, acoustic guitar music. She's not "in your face" about it though. If anything, she's pretty self-depricating about it.
• In Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard uses a hilarious line when pretending to be prey for Morinth:
  Shepard: I like obscure music.
  Morinth: How obscure?
  Shepard: If you've heard of it, it's already too mainstream for me.^note  This approach actually fails to attract her, because Morinth is at heart a hedonist, while eschewing the mainstream for the obscure is done many times for bragging rights.
  • Morinth herself counts as one, as her typical prey includes artists and creative persons. She also loves anything which celebrates hedonism and the grotesque.
• Affectionately used in Game Mod Red Alert 3: Paradox with the Viet Cong, who are hipsters by virtue of being underground and because no one has ever heard of them when they attacked.

Web Animation

• This sketch by Dorkly Originals parodies the generic hipster.
• Hipsters are the villains of the third season of The Most Popular Girls in School. A disgraced ex-cheerleader introduces hipsterism to Overland Park and it catches on with the entire populace, leaving traditionally popular people—such as the Villain Protagonist cheerleaders and the heroic deuteragonist football team—as outcasts. Near the end of the season, a Lower-Deck Episode takes place, depicting four peripheral characters who elected to go to a hipster concert instead of the football game, realizing they haven't actually had any fun since the hipsters took over and learning An Aesop that's actually a rather profound and heartwarming condemnation of both hipsterism and the mainstream:
  Ashley: Guys... I've got an idea, just hear me out: Maybe we should just like whatever it is we like. And if other people start liking it too, that's not bad. In fact, it probably means that whatever it is we like is pretty good. Only now we have people we can share it with. And if nobody else likes it, well, that's okay too, because it makes us happy.
• DSBT InsaniT: Killdra refers to pop music as 'tech-manipulated pop garbage'...but usually ends up singing it anyway.

Web Comics

• Hark! A Vagrant looked at some of the historical precursors of the hipsters.
  Kate Beaton: I think it's funny when people complain super loud about how 'hipsters ruined' this or that as though if hipsters would just go away the problem is solved and you can go back to wearing plaid shirts too or something. Because I mean, directionless youths have always appropriated things and made them annoying!
• Hipster Hitler is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Adolf Hitler as a hipster.
• Homestuck:
  • Dave Strider is initially a parody of hipster culture, as he's obsessed with (his interpretation of) irony, and with living in the most ironic way possible. Although, unlike most hipsters, his taste runs more towards hip-hop and dance music rather than indie rock. In any case, the events of Sburb have caused quite a bit of Character Development, and his interest in irony is no longer emphasized so much. It's also implied that Dave's obsession with irony is a coping mechanism for dealing with his Bro's creepier obsessions, and by the end of the story he admits that basing his entire life on irony has made him miserable and just once he wants to be able to genuinely enjoy something.
  • Dirk Strider is also very interested in irony—except he takes his irony so far that it twists back around to sincerity. Sometimes even he himself can't tell at what point his treatment of, say, the Detective Pony novel, transitions from mockery to celebration.
  • Eridan Ampora actually gets called an "ugly scarfnecked douchebag hipster" at one point, and he certainly dresses the part. On the other hand, he doesn't do very much hipster-ish besides dress the part.
  • His ancestor/clone/descendant/alternate-universe counterpart Cronus also looks rather like a hipster but he's just pretending to be a human Greaser Otherkin to get dates.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: "I am of the opinion that the word hipster means absolutely nothing anymore. People seem to use it to refer to people younger than 40 who wear clothes. And I’m sure even if they didn’t, that would be 'so counterculture' and end up being hipster too."
  • That said, if there are such a thing as hipsters, then the Arishok of Dragon Age II is one of them.
• Questionable Content allegedly features (or featured) hipsters, including main characters Marten and Faye, but the hipster tone has been dramatically lowered as time has gone on. The comic has evolved into more of a Slice of Life story featuring struggling post-college individuals than one about music. A helpful definition from QC: What's the best way to piss off a poseur-hipster-indie music fan? Actually enjoy music.
• What the Fu features a super-hip bar called the Hipster Jester◊. "It's so esoteric, it actually exists outside mainstream spacetime. You can't find it unless someone takes you there, and even then you probably won't remember the way."
• Real Life Comics:
  • In one strip, Greg considers getting some Converse All-Stars and his wife Liz starts insulting him, to which Greg replies that Chuck Taylors were around decades before hipsters were.
    Liz: Oh, so you're saying you liked them before they were cool, huh? I can't even look at you right now.
  • This gets a Call-Back a few weeks later, when Greg doesn't want to see The Hunger Games because it's too popular (since he tried Twilight due to its popularity and got burned).
    Liz: That's it, tomorrow, you are returning those Converse All-Stars.
    Greg: I am not turning into a hipster, I am turning into a cranky old man. Our jeans aren't as tight.
• Morris and Harry from The Word Weary are self-identified hipsters. The author said in the comments section of this comic that Morris has a real appreciation for the musical and fashion aesthetics of the subculture while Harry became one "because he heard hipster girls were easy."
• Heroes of Thantopolis Trickster, a cool ghost with shades, is a hipster
• Living with Hipstergirl and Gamergirl is about a man having an avid Gamer Chick and a hipster woman as his room mates.

Web Original

• The blog (and book) Stuff White People Like could be more accurately called Stuff Hipsters Like. That's one of the jokes, that "white people" = hipsters. They occasionally note the existence of "the wrong kind of white people", like those who wear Ed Hardy and enjoy the comedy of Dane Cook, but for the most part, they assume "white people" refers to young, pretentious, elitist, liberal white people.
• Look at this fucking hipster. Stopped updating once the book was published.
• "The Hipster Olympics", which is also a hilarious adaptation of the Upper-Class Twit of the Year competition from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
• Survival of the Fittest: Gracie Wainright and Rhory Anne Broderick of v4 both have tendencies of this trope. Bob Lazenby of SOTF-TV also fits, as do Leopold Sutherland and Eloise Winterburn.
• William Darcy from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is described almost as a Generic Doomsday Villain variant of a snobby hipster by the Unreliable Narrator, Lizzie Bennet. When he appears, he is actually a dorky if overly snarky Horrible Judge of Character who believes that Good Is Not Nice and has a rather low opinion of comformist modern society and a high opinion of himself.
• The Starks from School Of Thrones are a clique of hipstera. "The Stark way is the vintage way."
• Eric, from Mall Fight. He basically checks every box aside from being a vegetarian. Instead, he is a pecitarian (outside of Chinese food).
• Grooveshark (a music streaming website) had a prank on April Fools' Day 2012, where any music you play would elicit on-screen commentary from Hipster Jen or Hipster Otis. "I have this song on limited-edition colored vinyl." "I guess this song isn't TOO embarrassing." "This makes my mustache sad."
• The Basement Dwellers: Hipster Disease
• There's a "Pocket Hipster" iPhone app that scans the mp3s you have saved on your phone's memory and makes snarky comments about your tastes in music.
• The Nostalgia Chick used to be, but now wants to distance herself from those days as much as is humanly possible.
• Alex from Sex House has shades of this.
  Alex: Soren Damgaard is the hottest thing going now. I've heard of him.
• Tumblr has been (in)famously considered to be full of hipsters. The whole site works as such: You post some content (usually a picture). If others like it, they reblog it, and people who like it seen from those sites reblog it, and so on. You get recognition as the person who posted the thing before it was popular because it always leads back to you. Other subcultures have cropped up since then, but they still collectively refer to the community still focusing on this original form of blogging as "hipster blogs".
• Need some hipster word-filler? Hipster Ipsum has got you covered:
  Meh letterpress pickled, fashion axe 3 wolf moon ethical williamsburg readymade viral squid. Hella raw denim williamsburg, fashion axe forage dreamcatcher 8-bit. Portland meggings pug Truffaut, small batch skateboard trust fund mixtape fanny pack iphone literally raw denim kogi. Seitan truffaut gluten-free forage, sustainable biodiesel tousled yr artisan mlkshk art party trust fund squid street art. Chambray etsy quinoa, mlkshk kogi banksy trust fund shoreditch selfies truffaut jean shorts. Gastropub artisan selfies twee, meggings shoreditch Austin tonx umami bushwick fixie church-key blue bottle selvage. Freegan wayfarers hashtag, pour-over raw denim retro locavore organic meh kale chips meggings keffiyeh scenester flexitarian fingerstache.
• Cracked on hipsters and "anti-conformists" (although they're portrayed as identical-looking goths the author is mainly talking about hipsters but "nobody wants to draw hipsters, they'd have to be wearing something different in every panel and then there goes your whole day.")
• A popular trend on Facebook — most definitely played for satirical irony and laughs towards the whole Hipster culture — are "Hipster" versions of popular fictional (or otherwise infamous) characters. Hipster Slenderman, Hipster Hitler, Hipster Naruto, Hipster Stewie, Hipster Chewbacca, The Hipster Joker.. The list goes on... Just to drive the point home, almost all of their profile pics have them wearing the standard black horn-rimmed "hipster" glasses.
• Hipster Ariel — I mean "Helvetica" — and other hipster memes.
• Piper on Orange Is the New Black is portrayed as having been a hipster before she was sent to jail for drug-related charges.
• The Music Video Show: And now, The Music Video Hipster.
• The Onion:
  • "Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other 'Hipster'"
  • "Family Unsure What To Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions"
  • "New Ad Urges Hipsters To Go To Applebee's Ironically"
  • "Beard Husks On Sidewalk Indicate Start Of Hipster Molting Season"
• CollegeHumor sometimes makes fun of hipsters. Of particular note is their Instagram song, a parody of Photograph by Nickelback (which is a band that a true hipster would never ever listen to).
• The Kaskade Region, a Phonýmon region based on the Pacific Northwest US, takes many cues from its cultures, and the eighth Gym Leader, Trip, is a beanie-wearing hipster. He is very well-traveled, encourages everyone to ignore the labels that society gives them and just be themselves, and is rather smug when showing off his Pokémon, which his opponents have probably never seen, from regions they've never been to before.

Western Animation

• On the King of the Hill episode "Lady and Gentrification", Peggy sells a lot of homes in Enrique's neighborhood to hipsters, who like it for its ethnic flavor. Eventually they start opening business and driving up property values, to the point that poor Enrique can't afford to live there anymore; he rents his house, not own it. Peggy and Hank fix this by pretending that rednecks and typical sub white people were moving in.
  Hank Hill: Enrique's neighborhood sure has changed fast, I tell you what. All these "artists" have started moving in. They all look the same, all skinny and walk real slowly.
  Dale: The people you are referring to are called hipsters, Hank. They walk slowly because they've got nowhere to be, man.
• Super News had a recurring skit called "Hipsters In Space." Take a wild guess as to what it is.
• In Regular Show, Mordecai shows definite traits of this
  • Episodes like "This Is My Jam" made it pretty clear.
    Mordecai: You can't touch music. But music can touch you.
  • Also from the same episode:
    Mordecai: (Regarding Brain Explosion, his favorite band) Yeah, you probably have never heard of them. You gotta be in the know to know, y'know?
  • In the same episode, he also criticizes Rigby for liking a song from his youth because it was too popular. They listen to this song on cassette tape, which has enjoyed a renaissance in popularity amongst hipsters.
  • In "Camping Can Be Cool" he mentions he went to art school at some point while talking to Margaret, but he most likely dropped out.
  • And let's not forget that Mordecai talks like a surfer dude and/or stoner despite the fact he clearly isn't one, in fact being something of a lazy slob. Of course this is J.G. Quintel's real voice, but still.
  • The episode "Cool Bikes" is a big affectionate criticism towards the subculture, as it pretty much makes fun of the shallowness of recent hipster attitude. In this episode Benson takes the golf cart out and gives Mordecai and Rigby some old-fashioned bikes instead, and says that he won't give it back unless they become cool. To achieve this, Mordecai and Rigby start to buy very expensive clothes that squarrly fit into hipster stereotypes and adopt an aloof and cold attitude, it works just fine as they start to be admired by other hipsters who imitate their style, but although Mordecai and Rigby do look pretty cool, they do nothing to deserve that distinction. A common criticism toward current hipsterdom is that they are much focused on their image rather in real artistic merits (This was criticized since their early days, but it has become more prevalent during the late 2000s.) and they just do un-cool stuff (Old-fashioned bikes, miss-matched outfits with an 80's feel) with a "super-cold" attitude that immediately makes that stuff cool. Later in the episode they are accused of being "way too cool" for being alive (It Makes Sense in Context), and the prosecutor in the trial comment how everyone else copied their style and even mentioned "Ironic T-Shirts" (A staple of hipster fashion and attitude) as another trend popularized by Mordecai and Rigby.
• Zoey from Total Drama has hints of this. Specifically, her audition tape to get on the show mentions that she wanted to go to indie movie theaters, wear retro clothes and horn-rimmed glasses- basically thinking that acting like a hipster might make her different enough just to be noticed by others. She's really just a normal, sometimes overly-friendly girl filled with good intentions who tries her hardest to make friends since she has none where she comes from.
• In Sym-Bionic Titan, the members of the Disenfranchised band, particularly Ian, come off as this way as they kick Lance out of their band claiming that he's "attracting the wrong kind of audience."
• In The Simpsons episode "The Day The Earth Stood Cool", a "cool" new family moves in next door and Homer tries to be like them. Guess what this family consists of. As more of them arrive, Homer starts to find them annoying but the episode ends with the entire town embracing their aesthetic and Springfield declared the coolest town in America. Which is, of course, the point at which the original family decide Springfield's "played out", and they should move.
• The Grojband episode "Who Are You" is focused on hipsters. When Corey becomes one after Kin's sneakers malfunction, he stops wearing his beanie, wears glasses, and just says "Meh." with a bored expression on his face.
• In The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Antics on Ice", Skipper is driven to get Private to that Lunacorns show. He is haunted by future visions of a jaded, cynical Private who wears a trilby hat, a goatee, and eyeglasses that he doesn't need because "I'm ironic".
• The Scott Pilgrim vs. The World parody on MAD added a third love interest to Scott in the form of Snow White and made her a much more hipster than the other characters, with unnatural white and black hairstyle (obviously dyed) and big, chunky thick framed glasses
• Chuck and Leon, or The Chameleon Brothers, from Rocko's Modern Life were a satire of hipsters with snooty personalities, a coffee shop business, a hobby in indie films, and many other stereotypes.
• In the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "Plaza Prom", Enid is asked to break out her DJ Fireball persona for a prom, and she reluctantly goes along with it. She's visibly uncomfortable when she has to start playing "Mainstream trash", and is later shown hooked up to a respirator with an attending EMT nearby because it's killing her so much. KO later tells her to go ahead and play what's in her heart, prompting her to pull out the "GOOD MUSIC."
• In the Fake It 'Til You Make It episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fluttershy pretends to be a hipster, complete with 2010s slang like "woke" and "savage", hipster glasses, and a lot of Buffy Speak.
• Phineas and Ferb: Doofenshmirtz's evil scheme in "Sipping with the Enemy" involves going to a hipster-frequented coffee shop, using his newest -inator to suck the coolness out of the clientele, and giving it to himself so he can take over the Tri-State Area. While he does manage to steal everyone's coolness (turning them into Stereotypical Nerds), Perry's interference causes the coolness to be injected into the Flynn-Fletcher parents instead, causing them to dismiss Candace's latest busting attempt as "so beginning of summer" before heading to an art festival.

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