Same Glasses, Different Arrondissement

Hipsters have been declared culturally dead for years now, and yet the body keeps moving. The fixed-gear bikes, the thick-framed glasses, the flannel shirts in aggressively impractical colors—none of it ever fully disappeared. It just went quiet for a while, then resurfaced wearing different shoes and claiming it had been ironic the whole time.

I spent a while inside that world myself, back when Kreuzberg still felt like a discovery and Club Mate was something you drank because you actually liked the taste. The uniform assembled itself around me almost without my noticing: the beard, the glasses, the shirt. I was aware of the absurdity even as I was living it, which is probably the most hipster thing about the whole experience.

What’s interesting is how local the supposedly global phenomenon actually is. The French-German television programme Karambolage, which has spent years probing the differences between its two host cultures, turned its lens on the hipster populations of Berlin and Paris and found real divergence underneath the surface similarities. Club Mate doesn’t travel as well as fixies do. The specific flavors of studied authenticity differ by city, by neighborhood, by which cafés have already become too obvious. The plaid shirts cross borders; the attitude calibrates itself to local conditions.

That’s the thing about subcultures built around rejecting mass culture—they end up more regionally specific than the mass culture they’re reacting to. McDonald’s is the same everywhere. The hipster is not.