"The problem with the hipster, as history has made clear, was that trading bourgeois earnestness for bohemian irony didn’t actually do anything to rectify the depredations of capitalism."

Act Naturally: Pretentiousness, Coolness, and Culture

By Barrett Swanson

The problem with the hipster, as history has made clear, was that trading bourgeois earnestness for bohemian irony didn’t actually do anything to rectify the depredations of capitalism. Instead, hipsterism became just another style, an attitude susceptible to the very forces of establishment co-optation that the hipster’s eccentric strategies of parody and slang sought to avoid. This was to be expected. As early as 1934, critics like Malcolm Cowley were predicting that the outlook of nonconformity would inevitably be repackaged as a “consumption ethic,” since “self-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products — modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match.”