This summer, many ASU students hopped on a trans-Atlantic flight and set out to explore the culturally dense and diverse countries in Europe, where almost anyone can find something appealing: food, art, college credits and lower legal drinking ages. Among these clustered nations, France tops the tourism charts as the most frequented country in the world. So if you had the means to escape the 115-degree Arizona sun, there is a good chance you spent at least a few days sipping café crèmes and nibbling bleu cheeses in Paris.
It’s no secret that the French and les Américains aren’t always compatible — but sometimes we get so caught up in differentiating and shaping our own national identities that we fail to notice some fundamental similarities.
Like how, in many ways, Parisians were the prototypes for American hipsters. They wear skinny jeans and pointy shoes, v-neck t-shirts and leather jackets, they ride fixie bikes and Vespa scooters, chain-smoke cigarettes and are generally snobs.
There’s one fundamental difference: Parisians are not hipsters. At least not in the modern sense of the word.
The original hipsters were thought to be synonymous to the Beat Generation counter-culture. Our modern American hipster obsesses over his or her own social identity and image more than their American or Parisian counterparts. Julia Plevin, a blogger for The Huffington Post, wrote: “I shop at American Apparel, have an Apple computer, avoid Starbucks and other corporate conglomerate coffee, smoothie and frozen yogurt places, and consider myself ‘unique,’ but I assure you I'm not a hipster.” This essentially captures the irony of modern hipsters. They painstakingly avoid labels and social categories at the expense of fitting into the largest category of all: people who do exactly that.
Being a hipster is not just an image, it’s a state of mind. They hate people who follow trends, but because this mindset is now mainstream, they must logically hate themselves. And if it’s not yet clear: hipsters love irony.
Self-awareness tends to do a back flip on itself when it comes to hipsterdom, and self-referential irony has become so indicative of American culture that it’s impossible to keep up — it has created an illusion of eternally reflecting satire and there is no end in sight for this paradox.
But Parisians are simply Parisian: that is their social classification. Where hipsters are self-conscious, Parisians are self-confident. They appear to be unapologetically fashionable and act without fear of judgment or social retribution. Some people call this arrogance.
Besides these misled social sciences and diplomatic relations, the most common misconception is that our current paradigm of American culture is somehow new. Our affinity for irony is as old as the country itself. Puritan values at their finest are simply ways of justifying vices and turning them into virtues — as in, “for the greater glory of God.” It’s all about appearances here, and the average American teenager has evolved to appear not to care about appearances — and has failed at actually doing so.
Mock this hipster at djoconn1@asu.edu
