Creative Class

While I planned to work my way down the body in as unisex a way as possible, there’s a proverb somewhere that says something about looking a gift-horse in the mouth. In this case we’ll forgo the mouth to look slightly above the lip toward what I’m observing as a re-emergence of the mustache in North America.

I started seeing it a while ago at TimeKode - since about May or June of ‘08, ’stache after ’stache began to pop up in the party. While in Toronto over the holidays I kept my eyes open, and indeed there were more mustaches on the street than ever - on younger men too. I thought it was strange, but I was sure that after being ostracized by all of the respectable women in their lives that these guys would realize the obvious: we live in a post-Tom Selleck world - mustache’s are a no-no.

But at the ripe old age of 26 I was showing my age. These guys experienced no loss of attention or affection from the fairer sex - in fact it probably increased. And this confused me. In the months to come the trend would seem to trickle up to Hollywood, with star after star throwing caution to the wind and challenging the abiding anti-mustache coalition of the late 80’s and 90’s. Eventually Brad Pitt would confirm that the ’stache, love-it-or-lump-it, had fully arrived in North America - again.

While in India, they seemed to be experiencing the reverse as this article investigates:

The famous beards and moustaches of India - seen as representing a huge tradition to the outside world - are under threat, a new book says.

It says that the country’s famous facial hairs are disappearing as India enters the clean-shaven digital age.

“Hair India - A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Moustaches of Hindustan” says that India’s extravagant beards and moustaches - proudly sported by generations of Indian men - are being trimmed as the country becomes more clean-shaven and urban.

In reality there are only so many trends in facial hair that are even possible, so I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that the re-emergence cycle of lip-hair is so short in North America. It’s more the apparent spikiness of the phenomenon that’s interesting.

How could it be that while we’re bringing them back in North America, over in the east they’re shaving them off? How does place delimit style conventions in an increasingly globalized world? Is the world spiky not only in terms of economic prosperity, productivity, and innovation, but in terms of styles as well?

And now, as always, some music.

What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot.

Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:

one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.� An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.

While being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author’s point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.

In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music - the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related - mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.

In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool - as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.

How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it’s bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?

And now, as always, some music.