The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009

Lol... nice.

thoughts on this? http://twitter.com/whathipstersdo

Ha, are those Andy's Clarks in the #7 photo?

A few problems with these photos. I thought hipsters were antiestablishment. So why is one drinking Starbucks? Also, the hipsters I know prefer Pabst to High Life.

Is this a joke? No wonder this mag is tanking.

So there are no black or mexican hipsters? only whites and asians can be creme of the culture? bummer.

What about the garage rocker circa 2003? That's my favorite.

This is hilarious. I definitely remember wearing the white belt back in the day.

@Justin It's the same two models over and over again.

All she needs is a new plaid shirt to go with it: http://www.hipsteric.com/ask/is-plaid-still-cool/

There's something way too polished about this spread for it to be about hipsters.The male/female looks are really each pairs that should be one look per year.Which means we're missing a few tribes, including the notable ridiculous 2007ish Macbook DJ dude in day glo with his foxy gal pal wearing head-to-toe AA topped with a feather headband. While the word is a loathed and a dead-beat topic, capturing the looks of the decade is usually fun for readers but this production feels lazy, rushed for a Nov deadline (why not the reflective dec/jan issues?) and finally, a little thoughtless without any other editorial. As in you'd think a music magazine, would have the capability to also add in 'what live shows they saw before you' or 'favorite current album' something else to take you back, no?

Hipsters: please see this article and understand that walking your fixie is soooooo 2008. Get some gears and use the bike lanes!

Didn't tattoos go out of fashion circa 2006?

What a great post!

I know all of these people. A few have morphed through each stage of the evolutionary timeline, and some have gotten stuck along the way, but they are all VERY familiar.

Thanks for the laughs.

Are those TOMS Shoes?

Hmm, this is kind of BS. These are very high-end hipsters. Like a Vogue hipster photo shoot. Come on, PASTE, an iPod, an iPhone? The Hipsters I know post things on FB asking if someone can give them their used phone and they don’t care if the screen is cracked or if you can’t text the letter “n”. A True Hipster would still carry a portable CD player and a flip phone. One girl is sitting with a cup of Starbucks. That would never happen. A hipster is into the hole-ist hole in the wall and completely shuns corporate corpratiness. All of these t-shirts look newish/Threadless-ish and kind of pricey – not like they’ve scoured the Bins or spent hours at the Red Light or found it in a pile of stuff that somebody's girlfriend dumped on the curb when she kicked him out. The boots – they’ve all got sheen – so not cool... The only one that is somewhat accurate is #7 – the guy who could be mistaken for homeless. Want to see a hipster? come to Portland...they're free

Besides being shallow this depiction of the evolution of the 'hipster' is pretty off base.

Cleaaaaaaaaaarly all of these Negative Nancys are hipsters themselves. "The hipsters that I know..." Right!

Point of information regarding the 2000 "emo": guyliner was not prominent amongst emos in 2000. White belts, sure. Checkered belts, definitely. Guyliner, no. This guyliner version of emo didn't really occur until, like, 2005 or 2006, maybe? Definitely not in 2000. No one remembers real emo anymore.

This is so,,shall I say "corny" put together by someone that obviously is clueless to true hipsterism. every year and every get up is wayyyy off. Hipsters in space did a much better parody. Ahhem, the models are ugly as well.

maybe you guys could have gotten a guy with a real beard? i'm sure i was available for the shoot.

I am kinda tired of all this coverage of hipster culture, it's going to end up ruining it.. Anyways this is a vague portrayal of a semi vague subculture. For some content check out www.adequatelyfresh.com

This is funny, but it should be called "Some species of hipsters" instead.

This has NOTHING to do with the evolution or time line of hipsterdom....it's just a collection of the different sorts you might see now or at any point in the past, not how they changed over time:

Also to suggest that hipsters came from emo is stupid...and to top it off the persons pictured aren't even emo.

Sort of ruins mocking a sub-culture (for lack of a better word) when you demonstrate you don't even understand it....then it just comes across as sour grapes that you're not cool enough.

this is really one of the dumbest things I've ever seen... All of those "styles" have been in full effect since 1999... and you missed quite a few...

so you think you can stroll down bedford ave or ave A and just look at people and instantly label them...

this is the most unintelligent wank at youth sub culture I've ever seen and simply shows how not cool you are while you try to show us how cool you are.

and by doing this you are screwing everything up for people who have been just trying to live their lives as creative people in brooklyn for the last 10 years... How dare you try to brand my identity and re-package it for anyone to emulate. I like my style. I don't need help marketing it and if you do want to help try not doing such a terrible job. It's not about clothes and icons. It's about an outlook and a way of life. And people that dress the part and try to match it all up, there is a word for them... POSER!!!

2010: He's now more obsessed with commenting about what constitutes a REAL hipster on a funny slideshow than actually pointing and laughing like a normal person.

2010: He's now more obsessed with commenting about what constitutes a REAL hipster on a funny slideshow than actually pointing and laughing like a normal person and is no longer whether or not that qualifies as irony.

This is not accurate at all.

http://www.yourscenesucks.com/

Hipsters have always been into music, even when jazz preceded rock'n roll. Whatever suits your style, and this spread seems more about depicting some style. Walk down the streets in San Francisco and you will see all these types. From the vintage to the trucker hats, some things stay in. Far too mainstream and overly popularized by those with disposable incomes, the hipster scene has become just another fad. The shots look good by the way, an interesting production.

what I find really funny is that she doesn't even know how to shoot with a holga. the trigger is by the lens

Judging from most of these comments, hipsters are way easy (and fun!) to troll. Noted.

Lol this is the worst fucking list ever. I feel like a bunch of 40 year olds came up with this shit.

keffiyeh is spelled incorrectly

This is great, you have trolled the hipsters.

They respond in butthurt fashion, only a few realize that they were supposed to be ironic anyways.

For some of you it is time to grow up and get paid. Life is just ending for you and that makes me happy.

Where are the Rayban Wayfarers?

#6 The fauxhemian who suffers:

we would always say "seasonally inappropriate"

The spread is beautiful.

Nice concept, but these models are much too recently-showered and un-beerstained to really have been hipsters.

This isn’t clever or new, and it's anachronistic. Hating on hipsters in 2010 is like hating hippies in 1970—they’re both things my dad does/did with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. You missed the boat, in more ways than one, so you’re taking cheap shots about tattoos and beards. Get back to me when you have something funny to say about a perceptive observation.

Apparently none of the staff that worked on this snarky graphic was involved in perhaps the biggest (if not, the genesis of the) hipster movement - electroclash (larry tee, felix da housecat, fischerspooner, chicks on speed, dj hell, miss kittin/hacker, etc). I don't know how you could miss this, but it started around 2001, and arguably began the entire hipster thing. It predominated in cities with big electronic music scenes (with good "80's" or "electro" nights) and was one of the things that cemented places like Wburg and Berlin as hipster meccas.

Note: I'm not using "hipster" as self-aggrandizement for myself. If one is a hipster, they and others usually know it, end of story. This brings me to the fad of acknowledging the hipster, and then using the word ”hipster” in public, like at parties or bars with friends or acquaintances. I think this was perhaps the most effective method that this way-of-life spread like wildfire. A person could sit in Union Pool in Wburg (I’ve experienced this countless times) and dismissively use the “h” word describing a mass of people, while not necessarily (purposely) excluding themselves, thereby engendering and assuming themselves into this cadre of coolness. The fact that they mention the hipsters at all pretty much means that they’re doing something right: being noticeable, different; appearing creative and sophisticated; wordly.

Anyways: the people who took part in the electroclash scene would surely agree. Admittedly I was part of this scene but sometimes regret it in retrospect, as it seemed more about the fashion (angular, cubist black/red/white themes, linear sweaters, sharp haircuts, none of which appear in your montage), decadence, sullenness and debauchery than about the actual music, which is pretty much what wburg remains to be, even with the egregious exodus of young professional yuppies into the neighborhood who wouldn't know what electroclash was if they...heard it (they love to make fun/blogs of hipsters and wear those fucking ascots and roygbiv-colored ray bans, but are perpetually in the same neighborhood as those they scorn, cluttering up the same bars). With a few exceptions, not even much of the music was that great, and even the good stuff just seemed to get worse: it slowly but surely turned into shouting blonde femme fatales, which later devolved into fey, bearded, bespectacled, lo-fi indie fuzz that now dominates all 60 jillion bars across indie-rock America, and is generally much more lucrative and successful than it’s electro-based predecessor.

Even contemporary art cinema has been infected by the strains and fads of indie rock madness (wes anderson, spike jonze, michel gondry, juno, oh god), which brings me to the seminal 24 Hour Party People, which almost exactly time-stamped electroclash. As soon as people saw this movie, Joy Division/New Order and most other post-punk and new wave were re-released and re-invented and re-branded and re-worn out. I knew I was seeing some kind of musical/cultural revolution, simply because yuppies finally accidentally discovered good music (the famous wavelength album cover Joy Division shirt I remember being worn by dudes I knew were in frats, and now in movies like Juno trying to pander to the youth en masse), and started trying to become the people they wanted to beat up. Soon after that, big dorky preppies finally caught on to the irony thing, like the trucker caps and old band tees, and all was lost, and many good looks were corrupted by a tactless, undiscerning sense of fashion. I think now I have more respect for the actual, bona fide frat boys and preppies than the ones who do the hipster-fail.

Moreover, much of these "types" of hipsters you mention still exist. Judging by the fashions sported by the "emo redux", "scenester", "fauxhemian" (nice work on that name), "vintage queen", "williamsburg", "metanerd" and especially the "mountain man", they are all still alive and well in wburg. What you lack here is the “cool goth”, the “hippy hipster”, “the rich burnout” and you even forgot the basic “semi-new wave hipster” with black-and-white striped shirt.

Paste Magazine: I applaud your attempt to whittle down the course of a decade of culture, but perhaps you should probe the minds of those who don't read revisionist, second-rate magazines like your own.

So remember, when you decide to acknowledge who you are today, and take the link from this url and put it on facebook, you may as well be…a hipster. There I said it.

(Also: here's a hint for you not so on-the-pulse "hipsters": cold wave/minimal wave (a genre of music) is getting to be cool again and, like electroclash, highly fashionable. So get on it.)

Categorical as opposed to simulated progression. And, I enjoyed the history lesson from "simp" more then the perfect pictures.

It's just an article in a magazine chilllllll out. There's no need to write essays proving how much you know about hipsters. Congrats on that, though.

Oh, and trucker hats with fake "old" band tees was never a good look, so there's no one to blame for ruining it.

WTF? These look like perfectly normal (read: boring) people.

An emo with a bright blue t-shirt and a normal haircut?

Do your research, fellas.

This is more like The Evolution of the Trying-Too-Hard

What a bulk of crap !

Made by someone who doesn't know shit about either modern culture, trends, music or fashion !

This is cultural disinformation !

Oh man. Paste did an awful job here.

I disagree...

I think this spread is terrible because it reveals the harsh reality of how most people in the world view me and my friends, and that makes me feel insecure and uncomfortable, which I already felt anyway, I guess. I prefer any and all mockery to be directed at over-earnest writers, filmmakers and musicians who don't understand how to properly anticipate all possible forms of derision, and are thus unable to defend themselves against the Knights of the Holy Scoff. How dare you snark at us. We're supposed to be snarking at YOU.

Anyway, I'm going to retweet this so all of my beer-soaked party friends will come here and post drunken scoffs and snarks in the comments section while they ironically blast 80's pop music at full volume in their filthy apartments. That'll show Paste Magazine. I bet we can scoff and snark them so hard that they'll cry themselves to sleep every night, and their spouses will divorce them because of how uncool they are. You don't fuck with the cool kids.

No hipster would ride a modern Vespa.

cool!!!!

This article inspired me to write my own interpretation of the (D)Evolution of the Hipster.

Check the link.

Cheers!

lol at the butthurt hipsters.
I didn't know anyone would be proud to be a hipster or even want to defend them.
There is nothing innovative or countercultural about them (nothing like hippies back in the 60s early 70s for instance).
I guess eating gluten-free vegan crap and drinking cheap beer does make one lose their senses of taste and humour.

Anyway, this is pretty good, some of those pics look a lot like the wankers I see everyday in Melbourne hanging around thinking they are the shit, just like the douchebags in Ed Hardy they feel so superior too.

also: dyed black hair, gauged earrings, wears indie rock buttons such as ted leo, pedro the lion, etc.

Thanks for the laughs.

What about 2010? I'm curious since it is the last year of the decade.

I like the idea, but really show me anyone in a urban setting that does not have at least one attribute that would tag them a hipster. I think it is fairly ironic for a hip magazine to do a piece on hipsters, isn't that exactly what a hipster mag would do. just to prove how NON hipster they are?

Face it we have all lost our originality, because if we try to be "original" we are a hipster that is trying too hard, or if we just wear the same clothes that we did 10 years ago we are boring and out of date, like the flare jeans that were too short to wear with the square heel black knee high boot. but they still did, and do.

I don't know, i live on a farm what do i know.

Agreed - the proto hipsters white belt and guyliner do make for a soulful combination! free articles

So much win!

whats your guys beef with tattoos?

In response to pic #6:
Pretty sure that's Chinese... (美) .. And it doesn't mean "beauty" until it's followed by 丽.. right now, it just means "The United States") nice try, though. :P

Weak.

Eh. I think it's funny but it's pretty stereotypical. I'm "hipster" if I have to label myself, but I don't think it's right to categorize these people and then make fun of their individual opinions and likings.

These are the fake hipsters. No real hipsters dressed like this. Like Britney Spears is Pop music. These are Pop hipsters.

But funny shit.