Representing the middle-class ‘hipster’: Emerging modes of distinction,generational oppositions and gentrification

Introduction

The term ‘hipster’ originated during the 1930s and 1940s in the United States among young White urban counter-cultural middle-class males who sought to emulate the tastes and lifestyles associated with the African American jazz scene (Broyard, 1948; Mailer, 1957). In the late 1990s, the term re-emerged in Brooklyn, New York (Walker, 1997). It has subsequently diffused globally and become the object of widespread interest and contestation in public discourse (Maly and Varis, 2016).

In academic accounts, present-day hipsters are, like their predecessors, depicted as young urban middle-class people whose lifestyles are oriented towards authentic experiences and formed in rejection of mainstream forms of consumption (Maly and Varis, 2015; Schiermer, 2014; Thody, 2014). Hipsters are trendy consumers (Michael, 2015; Thody, 2014) of niche or rarefied cultural items, such as ‘indie’ music (Arsel and Thompson, 2011; Cronin et al., 2014), real ale (Spracklen et al., 2013) and vintage or ‘pre-digital’ objects (Schiermer, 2014). Hipsters’ alleged quest for authenticity is also in tension with a penchant for kitsch and irony (Schiermer, 2014; Thody, 2014). Moreover, they are frequently the object of considerable denigration, often for being snobbish towards the tastes of others and for a shallow concern to appear ‘cool’ (Arsel and Thompson, 2011; Cronin et al., 2014; Michael, 2015). In such situations, the hipster is positioned as inauthentic.

In the sphere of production, Scott (2017) argues that hipsters are micro-entrepreneurs associated with the creative industries and thus members of the middle-class fraction of cultural intermediaries, as identified by Bourdieu (1984 [1979]). Other studies show how hipsters establish retail enterprises in gentrified neighbourhoods (Hubbard, 2017; le Grand, 2017; McRobbie, 2016). In gentrification research, the term hipster is increasingly used to describe the trendy, young, White, middle-class gentrifiers moving into urban working-class neighbourhoods (le Grand, 2017; Zukin, 2010; Zukin et al., 2017). Hipsters’ appropriation of working-class space is part of their search for authenticity and ‘edginess’ (Douglas, 2012; Zukin, 2010: 22). Yet the hipster has become a controversial social type, seen as contributing to both the trendiness of gentrifying neighbourhoods (Douglas, 2012; Zukin, 2010; Zukin et al., 2017) and the displacement of working-class residents in the wake of rising rents and property prices (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf, 2011; Langegger, 2016; le Grand, 2017).

In sum, academic studies have identified hipsters as young ‘creative’ middle-class people found in gentrifying working-class neighbourhoods who adopt certain consumption practices and tastes. Yet current research lacks a more extensive analysis and theorisation of the links between class, taste, consumption, creative labour and gentrification in relation to the hipster phenomenon. To this end, this article explores how representations of the hipster ‘social type’ in newspapers and on blogs are bound up with processes of class distinction in present-day Britain. I will particularly engage with recent debates on the reconfiguration of the relationship between cultural consumption and class distinction as well as discussing how the latter is linked to generational oppositions and gentrification processes. The hipster is examined as a social type, that is, a public social identity (cf. Haglunds, 2009) formed through processes of typification (Almog, 1998) in which a group or category of individuals are classified as possessing a set of typical characteristics, for example, taste, value orientation, behaviour and social position. This is a performative process, not only in the sense that the classifications involved in social typing have symbolic and material effects but also in that they serve to position or ‘fix’ those who are typified in discourse (cf. Skeggs, 2004: 18). The next section discusses research on cultural consumption, class distinction and gentrification.

Cultural consumption and class distinction

A significant strand in research on class and consumption is, like this article, influenced by Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979], 1987) class analysis, in which tastes and consumption practices are bound up with classificatory struggles between classes and class fractions over forms of capital, recognition and worth. Skeggs (2004) contends that certain moral-aesthetic value standards are inscribed and institutionalised relationally through classification, not the least via public representations (cf. le Grand, 2015; Tyler and Bennett, 2010), so that middle-class people are cast as respectable and morally righteous, whereas working-class people are identified as morally lacking and non-respectable.

This article explores how representations of the middle-class hipster type are constructed, not only vis-á-vis working-class culture but also in relation to classificatory struggles of value between different generational groupings within the middle class. To Bourdieu (1984 [1979)], such intra-class conflicts involve the ‘opposition between the young and the old and between the senior members of the class and the newcomers’ (p. 295; quoted in Lizardo and Skiles, 2015: 10). In his analysis of the generational oppositions among the middle and upper strata in 1960s and 1970s France, Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) identifies the emergence of what he calls the new cultural intermediaries or new petite bourgeoisie – a younger, more precarious but aspirational middle-class fraction engaged in symbolic production in fields such as advertising, fashion, marketing and media. While positioned below the dominant class in social space, they adopt a more popular and cosmopolitan taste which challenges the highbrow-oriented taste of the latter.

In the decades since Bourdieu’s study, the Global North has undergone processes of deindustrialisation, neoliberal restructuring and economic globalisation which have seen increased social inequality and an expansion, as well as fragmentation of middle strata (Savage et al., 2015). Moreover, highly institutionalised, traditional forms of highbrow culture, for example, classical music, opera and ballet, have come to encounter significant competition from the vast expansion of popular or commercial culture. One aspect of this is that state support of cultural institutions increasingly also targets popular cultural forms (Roose, 2015; Varriale, 2016). Moreover, many high-status cultural institutions such as broadsheet newspapers have, to an important extent, come to address popular culture, such as hip-hop (Varriale, 2016).

In the wake of the above developments, traditional highbrow forms of consumption (e.g. watching art house cinema, visiting modern art museums) have declined as markers of prestige and distinction (Bennett et al., 2009; Prieur and Savage, 2013; Roose, 2015; Savage et al., 2015). But rather than spelling the end of class snobbery as proponents of the so-called omnivore thesis argue (Peterson, 1992), research shows that elites frequently make distinctions against others by adopting flexible and selective tastes, through which traditionally popular or lowbrow forms of culture are legitimated and transgressed (Bennett et al., 2009; Flemmen et al., 2018; Jarness, 2015; Lizardo and Skiles, 2015). Such cultural practices may function as ‘emergent’ forms of cultural capital, which involves eclectic, reflexive modes of consumption in which trendiness, that is, to be up-to-date with cultural currents, is essential (Prieur and Savage, 2013; Savage et al., 2015). In contrast, traditional highbrow cultural capital typically builds on mastering canonised knowledge in highly consecrated fields such as those in the arts mentioned above. Emergent cultural capital is also ‘predominantly urban’ (Roose, 2015) and linked to a cosmopolitan orientation (Prieur and Savage, 2013). Moreover, studies show that, compared with their older counterparts, younger middle-class people are more likely to display tastes for popular culture, including trendy or emerging rather than classic or established cultural forms, and more likely to draw boundaries against highbrow culture (Bennett et al., 2009; Lizardo and Skiles, 2015; Savage et al., 2015; Wright et al., 2013). These patterns may indicate that there is a generational division between ‘a screen-based, Anglocosmopolitan commercial culture that is appropriated with a certain ironical stance’ favoured by younger people, ‘versus a Eurocentric, cerebral, ascetic and serious highbrow culture’ (Roose, 2015: 557) dominant among older middle-class groupings. Generational factors entail that individuals born during a certain time period come to share certain experiences, which may serve as the basis for the formation of a common generational world-view and identity (cf. Mannheim, 1952). In this way, generational differences in taste within the middle class may be explained by the fact that younger age groupings have been socialised in a context where, as discussed above, popular cultural forms are more influential than in their parents’ generation (Roose, 2015).

The middle-class appropriation of popular or lowbrow culture has also a spatial aspect through the gentrification of urban working-class neighbourhoods. Gentrification usually entails a disadvantaged district with underdeveloped housing and hence a rent-gap getting an influx of middle-class people as well as undergoing state-led regeneration and private sector capital investment. As a consequence, rents and property prices increase in the district, which leads to the displacement and exclusion of working-class residents and retailers based there (Lees et al., 2008). Such processes of displacement and replacement are further facilitated by neoliberal policies of ‘rolling back’ (deregulation) and ‘rolling out’ (regulation or governance), which may be enforced through punitive or ‘revanchist’ means (Slater, 2016; Smith, 1996; Watt and Minton, 2016). Gentrification processes are also linked to post-industrial restructuring where cities become increasingly dependent on the creative, financial and business sectors, and hence see a concomitant increase in middle-class inhabitants (Hamnett, 2003).

During early stages of gentrification, gentrifiers are often artists (Ley, 2003; Zukin, 2010) and other middle-class groups with high cultural capital but less economic capital (Bridge, 2006; Ley, 2003), such as cultural intermediaries (Baker, 2012; Wynne and O’Connor, 1998). Early gentrifiers may have a positive outlook on diversity and on having working-class or minority ethnic neighbours (Ocejo, 2011). Other studies, however, show that gentrifiers draw symbolic boundaries against their new working-class neighbours and the suburban middle class (Bridge, 2006; Ley, 2003). Forms of distinction are produced through their display and maintenance of a ‘gentrification aesthetic’ (Bridge, 2006) – a form of objectified cultural capital that gentrifiers appropriate through the decoration or renovation of their homes (Carpenter and Lees, 1995) or through forms of micro-entrepreneurship (Baker, 2012). Finally, authenticity is a central theme for hipsters and other gentrifiers’ motives for moving into a working-class neighbourhood, their taste for a gentrification aesthetic and formation of a local identity (Ocejo, 2011; Zukin, 2010). The hipster gentrifier’s quest for authenticity, Zukin (2010: 22; cf. Douglas, 2012) argues, can be traced to the bohemian artists’ romanticisation of poverty. Early gentrifiers may therefore draw boundaries against later gentrifiers for destroying the authenticity of the neighbourhood and hence its sense of cool and ‘edge’ (Ocejo, 2011). The next section presents the research methodology of the study.

Research methodology

Representations of hipsters in The Guardian and its sister Sunday publication The Observer constitute the main source of data analysed for this article. As The Guardian is a left-leaning broadsheet and political orientation often affects how news media frame issues, especially in Britain (Baker et al., 2013), I also analysed a sample of articles published in the right-leaning newspaper The Times. Both broadsheets represent ‘serious’, elite media, which are more likely to attract readers with high levels of cultural capital than other types of newspapers, such as tabloids and middle-market newspapers (cf. Cheyne and Binder, 2010). Through the LexisNexis database I identified and selected articles published in both broadsheets between 2012 and 2014 that feature the term hipster. A total of 1162 articles in The Guardian and 1136 articles in The Times mention the term during this period.

Although I included online comments written by readers of the two broadsheets for analysis, to further explore public representations of hipsters dispersed from a potentially more grass roots level (cf. Hookway, 2008) than the higher echelons of the journalistic field, I chose to analyse a number of blog posts. Through the Google Advanced Search function, I identified and selected in total 180 blog posts published between 2012 and 2014 on two major blog providers of text-based blogs: Blogpost.com and Wordpress.com. An equal number of blog posts from each blog portal and year were selected. Moreover, in order to study representations of the hipster type linked to a British context, I selected those blog posts where either the blog author was based in the United Kingdom or the topic discussed referred to a UK context.

The empirical material was analysed in an ‘inductive-iterative’ (O’Reilly, 2005) fashion, that is, interpreted in an open-ended manner but in dialogue with theory and relevant empirical research. In this way, conceptual frames deployed in this article, including class distinction, cultural capital and gentrification, emerged during the research process. Key here in reflecting on the relationship between data, theory and empirical research was the extensive writing of analytical memos (cf. Charmaz, 2006: 72–95).

While faced with an extensive amount of material, in the vast majority of articles and blog posts, the term or topic of hipsters was only featured in certain sections of the text and sometimes only mentioned in passing; hence, only a small part of each article was subject to analysis. I started by ‘pre-coding’ (Layder, 1997: 53–56) all relevant parts of the texts, that is, I read through all sections while underlining parts of text and writing notes in the margins. To arrive at a manageable sample, in the next step I selected 156 articles from The Guardian, 60 articles from The Times and 53 blog posts, all from texts in which the topic of hipsters formed a more central part of the content. All of the selected articles and blog posts were analysed with the assistance of the qualitative software program Atlas.ti. In the following three sections, I discuss representations of hipsters in British public discourse.

The hipster type in British public discourse

A search in the LexisNexis database for mentions of the word hipster in the 10 most widely circulated national newspapers in Britain shows that the term hipster has diffused extensively in British public discourse. While 257 articles mention the term in 2008, numbers increase to 1636 in 2014. Representations of hipsters on blogs and in broadsheets are remarkably similar. As in other research (cf. Maly and Varis, 2016; Zukin, 2010), hipsters are identified as ‘youngish middle-class people’ (Bilmes, 2013), ‘creative middle-class people’ (The Ad-Pit, 2013) or ‘young creative types’ (Ferrier, 2014). Such ‘creative’ occupations include those in the creative industries, for example, advertising, media and information technology (IT), which Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) identifies with the cultural intermediaries. Like in recent research (le Grand, 2017; Scott, 2017), hipsters are sometimes seen as cultural intermediaries involved in forms of micro-entrepreneurship, for instance, in artisanal food and beverages, as evidenced by mentions of ‘bearded hipsters selling ox-tongue tacos from Airstream vans’ (Schopen, 2014) and ‘upstart hipster brewers’ of craft beer (Naylor, 2014).

Male hipsters in particular are most typically identified in discourse through their markers of style and consumption, which include workwear, vintage-style clothing, facial hair, tattoos and thick-rimmed glasses. Thus, one can find references to ‘Malnourished hipsters dressed as Victorian clock menders’ (Toast & Butter, 2013), ‘the fad for the “hipster” beard’ (In the Dark, 2014) and hipsters with ‘lion-tamer moustaches’ (Dimbleby and Baxter, 2013). Traditional markers of middle-class distinction associated with highbrow culture, such as knowledge of an established literary canon, appreciating fine wine or attending the opera (cf. Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]) are largely absent in representations of hipster culture. Rather, hipsters are represented as discerning, reflexive consumers of popular or lowbrow culture. References to ‘bearded hipsters selling ox-tongue tacos’ (Schopen, 2014), quoted earlier, can be interpreted in such terms. Using an unusual cut of meat and known as tacos de lengua in Mexico, ox-tongue tacos can, in contrast to generic fast-food tacos, function as a marker of ‘foodie’ authenticity and distinction (Johnston and Baumann, 2015 [2009]). Relatedly, craft beer is associated with hipsters and described in a Guardian piece as ‘young, urban and fashionable’ and ‘all about bold flavours and cool packaging’ (Naylor, 2014). In the same article, a self-identified hipster who organises a large craft beer festival says of his interest in craft beer: ‘I like looking for things that are well made and have interesting stories behind them’ (Naylor, 2014). Thus, unlike beer as a beverage in general, the craft beer of the hipster is aestheticized, trendy and linked to notions of craftsmanship (cf. Spracklen et al., 2013; Thody, 2014).

As in the craft beer example, hipsters are frequently portrayed as trendy or early adopters of emerging cultural trends (cf. Michael, 2015) who abandon the latter as soon as they become too mainstream. The hipster is therefore mocked for being a snobbish person who sneers at mainstream forms of consumption. One blog poster writes about ‘one of my friends from university’ whose ‘defining feature for me labelling him as [a hipster] … was that once a band became mainstream and became popular, they couldn’t possibly be any good’ (Little Tipple, 2012). Moreover, while hipsters may be associated with practices such as brewing craft beer which themselves may be coded as authentic, hipsters’ appropriation of those practices is often represented as only involving superficial, trend-conscious posturing and hence coded as inauthentic (cf. Michael, 2015). For instance, in a Times piece entitled ‘Why I hate hipsters’ (Self, 2014), the hipster is seen as engaged in only superficial forms of productive activity, making the latter symptomatic of ‘the world-girdling mass of mindless attitudinising that passes for “hip” in the third millennium since the death of the great sandal-wearing hippie’. Writing from a generational standpoint, the author claims that ‘us fiftysomethings’ are ‘to blame for this bullshit culture’ epitomised by the hipster. Implicit in the author’s account is that there was a time period preceding the hipster – presumably before ‘the death of the great sandal-wearing hippie’ – in which notions of hip signified practices with more substance and authenticity. Generational oppositions are also articulated by a commentator in The Guardian (Reidy and Rayner, 2014). While acknowledging that he might across as someone ‘Harrumphing about the youth of today’, he writes,

Cool… has always involved having something of an edge … The curious thing about modern hipsterism is that all the signifiers seem entirely ostentatious – the fact we tend to think about pop-up burger vans and espresso stalls when talking about what’s ‘hip’ these days suggests it is entirely an issue of conspicuous consumption in the most literal form – eating on the street. But what is a hipster book? What is a hipster record? Who is the hipsters’ favourite poet? (Reidy and Rayner, 2014)

Similar to the previous article, the author laments the lack of critical dimension attached to hipster cool and its reduction to conspicuous consumption, compared with earlier generations of youth subcultures. In public representations, hipster cool lacks any associations with rebellion and resistance against mainstream society, characteristic of the original 20th-century hipster (Broyard, 1948; Mailer, 1957) and the notion of cool more generally in post-war American popular culture (Frank, 1997; Pountain and Robbins, 2000). Representations of hipster cool as apolitical and inauthentic, however, seem to reflect wider processes in which cool has become incorporated into contemporary post-industrial, neoliberal capitalism and lost its subversive, critical dimensions (Frank, 1997; Pountain and Robbins, 2000). Therefore, as Maly and Varis (2016) suggest, ‘Hipster culture is thus compatible with neoliberal consumer culture and niched mass production – one could even say that hipsters are the product of this economy’ (p. 650).

Contestations over hipster cool

The hipster constitutes a rare case where a social type associated with the middle class, rather than the working class, becomes the object of widespread moral-aesthetic boundaries. But unlike working-class types like the chav (le Grand, 2015; Tyler and Bennett, 2010), the hipster is a more ambiguous and contested phenomenon. Thus, for instance, a Guardian piece debates the question, ‘Is it okay to hate hipsters?’ (Reidy and Rayner, 2014). While frequently denigrated, hipsters also receive considerable prestige and status in public discourse. As early adopters of consumer trends and fashions, many of which subsequently become appropriated by the mainstream, hipsters are frequently cast as elite consumers and trendsetters. One example is the trend of buttoning up one’s shirt collar about which a Guardian fashion journalist writes: ‘All you hipsters out there have of course been doing this for at least two years, and are now rolling your eyes at my tardiness’ (Cartner-Morley, 2012). The journalist adds,

Until quite recently, a fully buttoned-up collar was still the slightly avant-garde choice, and two undone buttons a perfectly acceptable look for the mainstream-fashionable man or woman. But we have now reached the tipping point. The unbuttoned collar is the new bootcut jean. It is now a faux-pas. (Cartner-Morley, 2012)

As authorities in matters of style and taste, young hipsters are seen not only as adopting this style long before everyone else but also as sneering at mainstream consumers for being late comers. Another example is a blog author who discusses a coat that she bought:

It’s big, it’s boxy and it’s really the sort of oversized thing that looks best on tall, skinny, ironic, hipster types. They would pull it on and look like they’ve nonchalantly pinched their boyfriend’s coat. I kinda look like I’ve bought a coat that doesn’t fit me. You know what? I don’t care. It’s great! (Odd Socks and Pretty Frocks, 2014)

Again, the hipster is portrayed as a knowing consumer – ‘tall, skinny, ironic’ – who, unlike the blog author, effortlessly understands how to pull off a look. This implies that she acknowledges that hipsters are superior in matters of taste and fashion. The prestige conferred to the hipster type is also shown by the fact that well-known, admired and respected people in fields such as art, fashion and media are associated with or labelled hipsters. Examples include actress and ‘hipster icon’ (Bilmes and Watson, 2013) Chloë Sevigny and model, TV presenter and journalist Alexa Chung, described as ‘hipster royalty’ (Neville and Cochrane, 2013) and a ‘fashion icon of this generation’ (Freeman, 2013).

The value attached to hipster cool, I suggest, reflects the increasing influence of emerging cultural capital rooted in the reflexive and trendy consumption of popular or lowbrow culture (Friedman et al., 2015; Prieur and Savage, 2013). The hipster is cast as able to ‘constitute, aesthetically, objects that are ordinary or even “common”’ (Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]: 40), that is, not traditionally subject to an aesthetic gaze. Similarly, the prestige attached to hipster cool also reflects the decline in the symbolic power of traditional highbrow culture, for example, the arts, as a source of consecration, distinction and cultural capital (Bennett et al., 2009; Roose, 2015; Savage et al., 2015).

In terms of the hipster’s positioning in middle-class social space, there are, as Scott (2017: 64) argues, ‘striking affinities’ between representations of the hipster and Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979]) analysis of the new cultural intermediaries and their tastes, lifestyles and ethos. The emergence of the hipster type may reflect the increasing visibility and importance placed, especially by policy-makers, on the creative industries as sectors for growth and innovation in neoliberal urban economies (Flew, 2012). Cool, a central notion in representations of the hipster, is also an attribute attached to and underpinning work cultures and value creation under contemporary capitalism, but particularly in the creative industries (Frank, 1997; McRobbie, 2016).

Why, then, is hipster cool disparaged? While a democratic ethos of openness and tolerance towards the cultural practices connected to other groups has become a middle-class norm (Bennett et al., 2009), old forms of snobbery have lost much of their legitimacy as forms of distinction (Savage et al., 2015). The conspicuous consumption of hipsters and their snobbish sneering at the tastes of others, therefore, become obvious objects of condemnation and critique. But I believe a more important aspect explored earlier is that of generational oppositions. A Guardian journalist suggests that hipster ‘bashing’ can be linked to a feeling of inferiority and anxiety resulting from growing older and failing to keep up with current trends:

… feeling out of date can result in an anger aimed at those perceived to be in the know. That anger often lurks behind many of the tiresome jokes and rants about hipsters, which so often portray this poorly defined group of people as laughing smugly at the rest of society. I don’t think anyone has actually ever been laughed at by a braying group of hipsters in real life but it’s the kind of thing you can imagine happening if you feel as if you’re standing on the outside. When you start to feel out of touch it can make you anxious, afraid even – of getting old and boring… /../ Better, then, to dismiss anyone you think is still up to date as an idiot or a hipster. (Rickett, 2014)

Thus, those who feel sneered at by hipsters react in a defensive fashion by sneering back at the latter in return. The importance of staying in touch with incipient trends and one’s failure to be in the know the older one gets can be linked to the argument that emergent forms of cultural capital are more commonly possessed by younger groupings (cf. Friedman et al., 2015; Prieur and Savage, 2013). The hipster’s conspicuous consumption of cool forms of popular culture may seem trivial, inauthentic and hence provocative to older middle-class groupings that are champions of traditional forms of highbrow cultural capital. By denigrating hipsters as inauthentic, they can cast themselves as authentic. Indeed, from her interviews with young creatives, Michael (2015) concludes, ‘Part of… hipster-bashing therefore lies in claiming for oneself the much valued authenticity that hipsters are so sadly lacking’ (p. 2). Thus, the ambivalence between prestige and denigration of hipster taste can be interpreted as bound up with struggles for classification and value between generational groupings within the middle class that involve notions of authenticity. Finally, the contradictory representations of hipsters have commonalities with historically preceding social types such as the dandy. During the British Regency period, the dandy’s style, taste and ability to influence trends were a source prestige, status and distinction, but tied to an ambivalent social position (Smith, 1974).

Hipster gentrification

Representations of hipsters as young creative middle-class people and the valuation of hipster culture as emergent cultural capital are also bound up with forms of class distinction and value in gentrified urban neighbourhoods. Thus, Silver Lake is called ‘LA’s hipster enclave’ (Warrington, 2013), and ‘hipster East End’ (Machell, 2014) refers to the gentrified parts of East London, which are also described as ‘capital of cool and home of the hipster’ (Glass, 2013). Similarly, a Sunday Times article on the East End neighbourhood Shoreditch claims that hipsters ‘have the collective ability to create profitable consumer trends for street food, craft ale and second-hand brogues’. As a consequence, ‘hipster ‘culture’ has transformed this part of the East End from grotty to groovy’ (Robinson, 2014). As also shown in an American context (Douglas, 2012; Zukin, 2010; Zukin et al., 2017), hipsters as lifestyle leaders and trendsetters are frequently portrayed to contribute not only to the edginess and cool of gentrifying areas but also to neighbourhood change.

In images of gentrified space, the hipster is sometimes also represented as a creative worker. A Guardian article on the newly opened ‘hipster hotel’, Ace Hotel London in Shoreditch, is a case in point. The lobby is described as a work space for mostly young men, ‘carefully dressed in casual clothes’, on laptops, including ‘two studiedly bearded men … conceiving a website to sell bespoke T-shirts’ (Beckett, 2014). Another example is the Cereal Killer Cafe in London’s East End, run by a pair of twin brothers sporting beards and tattoos, in which cereals are given ‘a hipster makeover’ (Jeffreys, 2014). The café has not only become controversial but also highly popular and widely covered by the media, with the proprietors, and hipster entrepreneurs more generally, being endorsed by commentators, such as the then London mayor Boris Johnson, as ‘wealth creators’ in gentrifying areas (see le Grand, 2017).

Representations of the hipster as a creative worker or entrepreneur in gentrified neighbourhoods can be linked to research which suggests that the presence of creative industries and forms of cultural entrepreneurship, together with their concomitant trendy lifestyles, serve to imbue such neighbourhoods with an attribute of cool (McRobbie, 2016; Mavrommatis, 2006). British cities have seen a growth of the creative industries in the population of cultural intermediaries, particularly in gentrified London neighbourhoods (McRobbie, 2016; Mavrommatis, 2006; Oakley and Pratt, 2010). The notion of hipsters as wealth creators can also be linked to a discourse of the ‘creative city’, which has been highly influential among policy-makers and following Florida’s (2002) work stresses the importance of attracting ‘creative class’ people to urban clusters in order to generate growth and innovation (see, for example, Peck, 2005, for a critique).

Associations of gentrifying neighbourhoods with creative cultural capital–rich groups such as artists are integral to the gentrification of such areas in that they attract capital investment and the regeneration of property (Bridge, 2006; Ley, 2003). Some representations of hipsters – as consumers, residents or retail entrepreneurs – can be read in similar terms as contributing to the transformation of poor working-class neighbourhoods into expensive middle-class districts. This suggests that representations of the hipster social type through notions of trendiness and cool as emergent cultural capital are performative in gentrification (cf. le Grand, 2017).

But representations of trendiness exist in tandem with images of hipsters as unwelcome incomers (cf. Brown-Saracino and Rumpf, 2011; Langegger, 2016; le Grand, 2017) who contribute to the higher rents and property prices in gentrifying areas. An article in The Times on the East End of London describes hipsters as ‘the shock-troops of gentrification’ and argues that what once was a cheap area to live has become increasingly exorbitant following gentrification (Machell, 2014). Relatedly, some commentators argue that the emergence of new bars, eateries and shops catering to the taste and budget of incoming hipsters serves to exclude existing residents and small enterprises. As a blogger commenting on the gentrification of a North London area puts it,

The hipster-friendly make-over of the Holloway Road is upon us with the inevitability of a melting ice shelf. And perhaps that is why our man in the Archway Cafe is so watchful, he might be keeping an eye out for the wrecking hordes: the girls with oversized glasses, cut-off shorts and day-glo leggings, the thin young men with buttoned-up plaid shirts, skinny jeans and implausibly bushy boybeards … an army of destruction as potent as any in history. (Secombe, 2012)

The author argues that traditional cafes like the Archway Cafe do not cater to the tastes of the ‘wrecking hordes’ or ‘army of destruction’ of hipsters and will be eventually replaced by other establishments. In some accounts, such new retail establishments are run by hipster entrepreneurs. Take, for instance, this reader’s comment in The Guardian:

The reason it [i.e. Shoreditch] is no longer ‘rough and edgy’ is because of the white middle class hipsters opening up trendy cupcake stalls and cocktail bars. The poor ethnic minorities are being pushed out. What is happening is not some cool, artistic anti establishment movement… it is gentrification and colonization. (Ferrier, 2014)

Similarly, moralising public reactions with elements of moral panic have been directed against the Cereal Killer Cafe and the hipster type over the price of cereals in the café, given the poverty levels in the surrounding area (le Grand, 2017).

Thus, ‘hipster gentrification’ is represented as involving processes of socio-spatial exclusion and displacement of working-class people which have an economic dimension (rising rents and property prices; the proliferation of more expensive retail spaces) as well as the cultural displacement of working-class life, that is, ‘the replacement of a group’s everyday way of life in the neighbourhood with that of another’ (Ocejo, 2011: 286). Such negative media images of gentrification are also identified in other studies (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf, 2011; le Grand, 2017; Zukin et al., 2017). The cultural distinction of hipster aesthetics as emerging cultural capital, then, while drawing on or ‘propertising’ (Skeggs, 2004) elements of popular or lowbrow culture, implies status differentiations with working-class culture which serves to exclude working-class locals from gentrifying areas.

Moreover, alarmist public reactions against hipster gentrifiers like the above may indicate wider social anxieties. What has been largely unacknowledged in public representations, however, is that such anxieties have emerged in a context of an ensuing housing crisis as well as increased gentrification, inequality and polarisation following the 2008 financial crisis and three decades of neoliberal restructuring in Britain (le Grand, 2017; Slater, 2016; Watt and Minton, 2016). Neoliberal housing and welfare policies have greatly contributed to the social and spatial displacement of working-class people from gentrifying districts. One factor is the deregulated private rental sector which makes neighbourhoods with low rents vulnerable to increased demand (Watt and Minton, 2016), for instance, when ‘creative’ areas such as those in the ‘hipster East End’ become cool and trendy (Baker, 2012; Mavrommatis, 2006). Working-class displacement is also increasingly state-led via the privatisation of council-housing (Slater, 2016; Watt and Minton, 2016). As gentrified areas become so strongly associated with hipsters, the increasing critique of gentrification in public discourse as leading to the spatial and cultural displacement of working-class residents (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf, 2011; le Grand, 2017; Zukin et al., 2017) may spill over onto the hipster who becomes a symbol of the inequality and exclusion resulting from gentrification.

Finally, this article focuses on class representations and not on the formation of racialised boundaries in relation to the hipster type. Yet, while many gentrified neighbourhoods, such as those in London’s East End, are highly diverse, it is notable that the concerns of minority ethnic residents are generally ignored in the representations on hipster gentrification. Thus, their potential grievances (e.g. as identified in Langegger’s (2016) research) are never voiced.

Conclusion

I have argued that the sometimes paradoxical ways in which praise and denigration are directed at hipsters have emerged in a context of changes in cultural tastes and struggles for classification within the middle class that are rooted in generational oppositions. The hipster is frequently cast as a young ‘creative’ person who is part of the middle-class fraction of cultural intermediaries. The wide circulation of the hipster type, then, may reflect the increasing influence and presence of the creative industries in post-industrial, neoliberal cities in present-day United Kingdom (Hamnett, 2003; McRobbie, 2016).

The hipster is frequently represented as an authority on popular culture to whom other people losing touch with the Zeitgeist look up and perhaps also feel inferior or envious towards. In this way, representations of hipster tastes and practices can be read as involving status differentiations vis-á-vis traditional highbrow consumption practices associated with an older generation of middle-class people. Thus, I have suggested that the representations of hipsters may reflect the delegitimisation of highbrow taste and the increasing legitimacy of emergent modes of cultural capital championed by a younger generation and rooted in the knowledge of popular currents (Friedman et al., 2015; Prieur and Savage, 2013). Similarly, the article contributes to research on emergent cultural capital by showing how the hipster type and its cool aesthetics can create a sense of creative cultural distinction and trendiness for inhabitants, entrepreneurs and spaces of consumption in gentrifying areas.

Hipsters are also denigrated, sometimes by commentators representing an older generation, for forming a shallow, apolitical and hence inauthentic relationship to culture. In so doing, commentators can construct themselves as morally righteous and authentic, not the least those who position themselves as belonging to a generation where youth culture had more substance and subversive potential. The alleged inauthenticity of hipster cool can be linked to academic work which shows how cool has become commodified under contemporary capitalism and stripped of its capacity for subversion (Frank, 1997; Pountain and Robbins, 2000). Moreover, hipster consumers and micro-entrepreneurs are critiqued for contributing to the exclusion and displacement of working-class locals and their retail businesses. Thus, the sense of cultural distinction hipster taste symbolises can be read as involving status differentiations vis-á-vis working-class people. Although largely unacknowledged in public discourse, the moralisation of hipsters and gentrification has emerged in a context of heightened social anxiety over a shortage in affordable housing and increasing inequality in British cities following the past decades of neoliberal restructuring and the 2008 financial crisis (le Grand, 2017). Tyler (2015) suggests that the current precarity, anxiety and competition experienced in (post)austerity Britain have led to increased oppositions within the middle class in which the hipster has become a figure of blame for ‘diminishing social resources’ (Tyler, 2015: 506).

These developments suggest that the generational oppositions Bourdieu identifies between the tastes and consumption practices among the cultural intermediaries vis-á-vis the dominant class prevail today. However, as Prieur and Savage (2011) put it, the ‘“new bourgeoisie” that was upcoming at his time may be in the central position now’ (p. 578). Generational struggles for classification around the middle-class hipster may therefore reflect wider processes where ‘elite culture itself is being remade, especially amongst younger groupings’ (Friedman et al., 2015). Such generational aspects of class distinction can be linked to the different contexts of socialisation between different age groupings (cf. Mannheim, 1952). Younger generations have generally been socialised in a context where popular or commercial culture has a more dominant position vis-á-vis traditional highbrow culture compared to their parents’ generation (Roose, 2015; Varriale, 2016).

The associations of hipsters with the conspicuous display of trendy and desirable lifestyle markers may also indicate processes hypothesised by Friedman et al. (2015), namely that high-status signals and cultural distinction to a greater extent are communicated through ‘a more openly “knowing” expression of cultural aptitude – an aesthetic of engagement and exhibition’ (Friedman et al., 2015: 3), in contrast to highbrow cultural capital which is traditionally acquired through the study of consecrated and rarefied forms of ‘high culture’ such as those in the arts (Bourdieu, 1984 (1979)

The conclusions of this study are also relevant to research on the diffusion of trends. Some scholars argue that age has largely replaced class as the central explanatory factor in the dispersion of fads and fashions (Crane, 1999; Suzuki and Best, 2003). However, the notion of the hipster as a trendsetter, qua young and cultural middle class, rather seems to constitute a case where class and generation intersect. Finally, there are notable silences around issues on ‘race’ in representations of hipsters in what are often highly diverse gentrifying neighbourhoods. Hence, future research needs to address how the White middle-class hipster is constructed in relation to racialised distinctions in such areas.