Hipster (also referred to as scenesters[1]) is a term frequently used to refer to a subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers. Usage of the term reappeared in the 1990s and persists to the present. The subculture is associated with independent music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, and alternative lifestyles. Interests in media would include independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.[2]
Hipster culture has been described as a "mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior."[2] Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York argues that "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge," and draws on the "cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity," and "regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity."[3] Others, like Arsel and Thompson, argue that hipster signifies a cultural mythology, a crystallization of a mass-mediated stereotype generated to understand, categorize, and marketize indie consumer culture, rather than an objectified group of people.[4]