It's mid-September and it's getting harder to deny the fact that fall is just around the corner. Or maybe it's here already. (When's Daylight Savings, again?) Anyway, fall is a new season and new seasons mean new trends, and while, in general and as a rule, we hate trends, new trends mean that, God willing, we can finally say goodbye to old ones.
While everyone falls victim to the trend every now and again (Yes, even yours truly -- I own some skinny black jeans that I more or less never take off and I may or may not have a pair of purple knock-off Ray Bans, though, to be fair, I tell myself I have them only because, um, hello? They're purple. But I digress.), no one group of people have ever so succumbed, so embraced, so clutched on to trends for dear life with cold, pale, smoke-yellowed fingers as that so-called creative counter-culture: The Hipster.
Am I generalizing? Probably. Am I aware there are exceptions to the rule? Absolutely! Am I going to clarify shortly? Let's hope so.
From what I can tell, the hipster depends, nay, thrives on irony, but the problem is that in doing so, they've a) diluted and deserted any formal definition that irony may or may not have once had and b) they've only served to create a fashion version of The Blob in which once they adopt a "trend" -- usually historical and always ironically, of course -- it feeds on itself, and it grows and grows until frat guys are wearing it and the cast of "The Hills" are designing it, and then someday Rachel Ray will star in a Dunkin Donuts commercial while wrapped in it. Or maybe it's the other way around. (As Meryl Streep can attest, it's all so very, very complicated.) Whatever, moving on, because there's a c).
And so: c), though they initially drench themselves in these sartorial affectations in a (soon-to-be proven misguided) attempt to show how very unconcerned they are with what exactly it is they wear and though it would seem that their entire image hinged upon the sheer disinterest they have in other people's opinions and the exquisitely cultivated and the desperately disdainful, "What, this? I picked it up off the floor and pulled this out of the garbage and stole this from my myopic maternal grandmother!," the very act itself is contradictory. In attempting to embrace something so patently unflattering so as to prove how patently unimportant such flattery is, they are -- in fact -- acknowledging their concern, and therefore, their endorsement.
Too complicated? Don't worry. To put it simply: these trends, these accoutrements, these god-awful outfits are fugly. And yet, they are everywhere. And somehow they just never seem to go away.
And so, without further ado (since there has been so obviously more than enough): I bring to you, seven hipster looks I love to hate. And I do mean hate.
So, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Think I'm a judgmental brat who has no taste in clothing? Let's have at it! Share your favorite (and least favorite) trends and non-trends in the comments below.