Representing the middle-class ‘hipster’: Emerging modes of distinction, generational oppositions and gentrification

Abstract

This article explores how representations of the ‘hipster’ in newspapers and on blogs are bound up with processes of class distinction in contemporary Britain. The analysis demonstrates that the hipster is a contested middle-class social type who is the object of both denigration and prestige. The hipster is typically represented as a young person associated with the middle-class fraction of the cultural intermediaries who is engaged in a particular set of reflexive and trendy consumption practices, often performed in gentrified urban spaces and linked to the creative industries. The article suggests that the disputed status of ‘hipster cool’ is indicative of shifting class distinctions in cultural taste and classificatory struggles within the middle class between generational groupings that involve questions of authenticity. Such contestations are reflected by the increasing legitimacy of emerging forms of cultural capital rooted in popular culture and embraced by young people, and the waning symbolic power of traditional highbrow culture associated with an older generation of middle-class people. It is also argued that the classificatory struggles over hipster tastes and lifestyles have a spatial dimension as bound up with the public controversies and social anxieties linked to gentrification in neoliberal Britain.