This summer I spent three days in NYC with one of my college roommates. By my account, and I say this with love and no malice because despite my artsy leanings I am one too, she is a yuppie. She’s a fashionable yuppie though, while I am a Gap of two seasons past yuppie. Anyways, when we arrive in New York, she’s wearing skinny jeans. I am jokingly flabbergasted by her jean choice. When we were interns together in Washington D.C., she was of the bootleg jean set, with me. We both would have rolled our eyes at someone in our program thinking they were hipper than their suburban Californian roots. However, I said what I felt, “I’m beginning to feel like my boot-cut jeans are mom-jeans.” She agreed, “That’s really why I switched to skinny jeans. I was beginning to feel like my wardrobe was outdated.” Chris has yet to sport grungy Converse sneakers but her acceptance of skinny jeans reinforces the acceptance of hipster trends in the mainstream consciousness. Besides skinny jeans, there are the jokes of TV It Girls and a certain contending A-List Hollywood hunk, that are signifying that the way Millennials defined itself when they fled from the suburbs to the cities is making its way back to define the suburbs too.
Turning on the fall TV schedule, Zooey Deschanel headlines the new FOX show “New Girl”. On the show, she sports geek-chic black rimmed glasses, a penchant for tweein’ out by singing all the time, and that youth staying in a hostel/working at Intelligentsia shaggy haircut. Before, Deschanel was already the poster girl of hipster culture to mainstream America, with her Cotton commercials and (500) Days of Summer fame, but she wasn’t famous, famous. She was always a little too odd for that, a little too artsy, vintage, with those doe blue eyes that seemed to glare from a 1930’s postcard. Now that network TV has not only cast her but built a show around her, when in the past, as NY Mag noted, she would be the kooky friend of the show runner, Deschanel is top-billing.
The proliferation of hipsterdom in TV doesn’t end there, it’s used as a punch line on two other networks. Flip onto CBS, there’s Kat Dennings on “2 Broke Girls” lamenting in a Williamsburg restaurant of the yarn hat wearing, out-of-control beard growing, 20-something dudes that lounge around while suckling off of their rich parents teat. Click onto ABC, where “Happy Endings” had an episode last season where Casey Wilson’s character accidentally dates a hipster which results in her needing a whole hipster makeover. When Wilson is found out, by not dressing ironically to an 80’s theme prom party, she is shunned by her pretentious date and his friends. Mocking hipsters for being pretentious, lazy snobs is an extra-curricular for their Millennial peers but bringing this new joke to a wider audience allows older generations in on the joke too and gives them a label for what they might have perceived as just the youth wanting to look homeless.
If there is a Jude Law of 2011, who was in every third movie that came out in 2004, but in hipster form, it’s Ryan Gosling. Gosling brings his ever-earnest, he has tattoos of hearts being smashed into cactuses or something and acts as a peacemaker in a NYC street fight, from indie drams like Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl into the wide releases of Stupid, Crazy, Love, Drive, and The Ides of March. While he can be red carpet polished, he walks around NYC with a real troubadour, ratty sneakers, and Goodwill tank tops. And sure celebrities be wacky, but Gosling has that pat hipster seriousness about all his nonsense. There is no playing this up for paparazzi when it comes to Gosling. In the past, Gosling wouldn’t have made it out of Parker Posey territory, he would be an indie movie actor where his handsome yet apathetic screen presence would register. However, with all his current releases he is poised to be something big, which wouldn’t have happened had Gosling tried to make it into wide release say in early aughts.
It’s interesting to see a trend come into wider acceptance. I haven’t been old enough to see this happen before. I remember loving N’SYNC and Britney in their Disney concert days, long before the puka shell necklaces, highlighted spiky hair of young men, and pastel eyeshadows became synonymous with the late 90’s, but I didn’t stand on the sidelines for that one. And I am not purposefully avoiding joining in on the big hipster breakthrough (hipster breakthrough would be a phrase quite loathed among some people) with its 21st century movie star, TV heroine, and style. But it’s interesting to see how my generation is presenting itself to the world. I have yet to join in....I'm still rocking my bootcuts. However, it's worth noting, when I went home to California this summer, my mother played croquet in a pair of skinny leggings.
