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The Hipster Handbook
Treading that oh-so-hip line between irony and fashion
. . . by Christopher Hu and Jessica Grose
[Illustration by Leksi Weldon-Linne & Kea Johnston]

IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE Robert Lanham, author of the recent Hipster Handbook, “cool” is nolonger the preferred adjective for generic approval; those in the know use “deck” and “fin” to express what squares mean by “cool” and “lame.”

Surely this and the rest of Lanham’s expansive section on hipster vocabulary is meant to strike fear of unhipness in the hearts of readers, but it seems likely that he fabricated it entirely for this purpose. Fittingly, the great thing about this little countercultural ethnography is its internal conflict between a relentlessly thorough cataloging of the methods of modern pretentiousness and a tongue-in-cheek swipe at said pretentiousness. One of the “11 Clues You Are a Hipster” is “you enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.” Hypocrisy is deck these days, right? For every piece of fake slang, there’s an apt observation that speaks of a deep familiarity with a loose set of styles and attitudes that does actually exist. The Handbook is so fun because any would-be hipsters reading it would have to agree that Lanham has us pegged pretty well.

According to Lanham, contemporary hipness is post-emo, post-indie, and decidedly postmodern. The hipster lives in a world where kitsch and irony are the highest ideals, a world where mainstream culture is only acknowledged for purposes of knowing, half-sarcastic appropriation. Lanham offers up a dozen or so “hipster personality types,” which are juicy opportunities for self-diagnosis: I placed myself somewhere between the privileged “Unemployed Trust-Funder” and the neo-Marxist “Polit.” Proper musical tastes (anything on Matador, Def Jux, or Dischord suffices), locales (most cities have a suitably hip neighborhood, but Williamsburg, Brooklyn is the current hipster mecca), and magazine subscriptions (Harper’s and Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s) are a must. Even the right education is an essential for most hipster breeds—graduating from a privateuniversity with an arts degree is the optimal educational choice. So how does Brown fare in the handbook’s “Ivy League for Hipsters?” We earn a respectable B- to RISD’s A-, but Lanham is obliged to give a shout-out to two of our dependable bastions of hipsterdom, the MCM department and Ocean’s Coffee Shop.

... and Dangerous in the Hands of the Wrong People
The Hipster Handbook is not an original. In the 80’s, its self-referential precursor was The Official Preppy Handbook. Written at the dawn of the Reagan Era by Brown grad Lisa Birnbach, the Preppy Handbook was the bedside reader for those who couldn’t tell an Izod from their asshole. Meant to be deeply tongue in cheek, the Preppy Handbook became a guide for the truly clueless. Corn-fed public school girls from Wisconsin treated the Preppy Handbook as their bible to East Coast survival. One online reviewer of the Preppy Handbook at reviewindex.com boasts, “When I was in prep school in Massachusetts, my roommate and I were invited to an afternoon lawn party with several of the deans. Not knowing what to wear for such an occasion, we consulted ‘The Handbook’…Although we were two of the only people wearing seersucker suits, we were confident in our attire and received many compliments throughout the afternoon.”

Reviews of The Hipster Handbook have questioned the veracity of Robert Lanham’s Hipster lexicon. Perhaps, like Birnbach, Lanham is clearly going more for irony than complete truthfulness. I’ve never heard most of the slang Lanham glosses, like “tassel” meaning girl and “boggle” meaning vomit, and I’m someone who is mercilessly lampooned by The Hipster Handbook on a number of occasions for being a striving hipster. I’m mocked most adroitly in the fourth of the “11 Clues you are a Hipster”: “You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured but have one pop vice—ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones.” I pride myself on loving the Shins and Almodovar, but ElimiDATE is on my TV every morning at ten thirty.

The Hipster Handbook, though, might have the same impact as the Preppy Handbook did twenty years ago. Uninitiated yokels with hipster leanings might look to The Hipster Handbook to point them to true postmodern glory. Now that would be deck.

Christopher Hu B’06, is a post-ironic post-man, and Jessica Grose B’04 uses Elimidate as her Bible to East Coast survival.

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