hip·ster1 [hip-ster] –noun Slang.

1. a particular breed of middle to upper class 20 some things that tend to inhabit surrounding neighborhoods of urban areas. The hipster generally has money, yet shuns conventional materialism. They try to appear starving, broken, and angry, yet have the comfort of living in $2000 lofts. Trust funds are a common commodity among hipsters.

The goal of the hipster is to look ironic.

The hipster handbook defines the hipster as “One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term “cool”: a Hipster would instead say “deck.”)

The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat.”

It becomes a difficult task to then differentiate between those who actually cannot eat, shower, or afford clothes. The hipster’s style aesthetic is influenced by the homeless. The hairstyles worn by the hipster is generally ragged, dirty, and has the appearance of a lack of care though often hours of care is put into the upkeep of said look.

In areas such as Williamsburg is generally safe to assume that anyone possessing this look is indeed a hipster.

Clutching their Ipods and sipping PBR, the hipster has taken over areas that were once affordable and turned them into a hipster oasis prompting stores such as Brooklyn Industries and American Apparel to move into these neighborhoods.

In main urban areas, like Manhattan, it becomes difficult to distinguish between “homeless” and “hipster.” Unkept hair, dirty clothes, a general disdain for life in general? Homeless or hipster? You decide!

Test your skills with these nifty photos so you don’t give spare change to someone with a trust fund. Play the game after the jump: Read More »

• Men tend to enjoy breasts. And according to the (female) author…we shouldn’t blame them (or show them). (Yahoo!)

• What if Apple never existed? What would hipsters identify themselves by (technologically speaking, of course)? (Yahoo!)

• Blast From the Past: On her 2006 tour, Amy Winehouse needed beer, wine, vodka, pizza…and sober roadies (to carry her to bed). (Smoking Gun)

• All I can picture is a team of high school football players high fiving the kid involved in this. Also, this. (Idahostatesman.com)

• Wait, so this weed was found underwater and it’s still worth over a million dollars? Lucky fisherman. (citizen.co.za)

I get on and off of the L train everyday and make the half mile trek down Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. Since moving to New York, with all its freaks and noises and things that could provoke anxiety in a small town Massachusetts girl, this walk has become the most nerve wracking part of my day.

Bedford Avenue, or the hipster catwalk, is the main drag down oh so trendy Williamsburg. I try to stare straight ahead and smoke a cigarette as soon as I get off of the train, but inevitably some hipster catches my eye and throws me a dirty look. I can’t help but stare back because I wonder how long it took him to squeeze into those pants. Read More »

I have a confession to make. I may or may not have strong hipster inclinations. You really can’t blame me for this turn of events, the signs were there for years: obsession with knowing the newest bands, very experimental fashion, rolling my brown eyes at people who actually watch the music videos on MTV and think that the Pussycat Dolls actually fall under the category of “good music”.

Moving to New York for the term just made everything worse. Suddenly I was with my own kind, it was like coming home for a family reunion. Only the hipsters I saw, well they were way more hip than me. Read More »