Saturday, August 06, 2005

Hipsters: the new Hasids

I just got back from a day/evening hanging out on the Lower East Side and in the East Village with a whole bunch of Stuy kids--sorry, a bunch of grown-up New Yorkers who happen to have attended the same high school as I did. (I also walked around the Lower East Side with my mother, who did not attend Stuyvesant, but who can still get a WWPD mention.)

Today it was in the mid-90s in NYC, yet the hipsters simply could not abandon the cowboy boots. If the word "ubiquitous" ever had to be used, here would be the place. I even saw a woman in leather, western-style boots that just about reached her knees. They also wore far more layers than necessary--was today really the day to sport the whole dress-over-pants combo? Along with hipsters, the Lower East Side still has some Hasidic Jews, who also dress for cooler weather, but who at least have a religious obligation to do so. So does this mean that "hipster" is a religion and should thus be capitalized? (As in, I've heard that many Hipsters live in Williamsburg.) Maybe what makes a group of people with common habits and aspirations a religious group is that they dress in weather-inappropriate ways in order to assert group membership. I, meanwhile, wore sneakers, shorts, and a tank top, thus asserting my membership in neither the Hipster nor the Hasidic congregations.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A Hottie? -- JM

Anonymous said...

I want to see the two groups merge. Come on, both groups asceticism have only one end game.