OK, we know we have an official Brokelyn policy to avoid all uses of the word “hipster” but it is useful sometimes. For instance, how do you know if someone is TRULY a hipster? They claim, despite all available evidence to the contrary, that there’s no way they are one, which the illustrator of the above New Yorker cover, is claiming. That, along with hating hipsters, is the most hipster characteristic of all.
And hey, we don’t say it because we can’t laugh at ourselves. Or even to bag on the cover, which is goofy, in a haughty, New Yorker sort of way. But cover artist Simon Greiner protests too much in his interview about the cover. We’re willing to believe the illustration isn’t actually him (who has a Twitter logo tattoo? Hopefully no one), but he goes on to say: “I certainly move in a world where those people exist—they’re all around me—but they’re not my people. I’ve been identified as a Brooklyn hipster, but I’m sure I’m sort of at the edge of that Venn diagram.”
Which, first off, being at the edge of a Venn diagram means you’re inside the Venn diagram and second, you moved here from somewhere far away, live in a gentrified neighborhood (Park Slope), had a studio in Williamsburg and did a cover illustration for the New Yorker. So yeah, people are going to call you either a hipster, or a yuppie. And you’re WAY better off being identified as a hipster, because literally no one likes yuppies, while even the people who grouse about hipsters every day secretly like them, because it gives meaning to their terrible lives to complain about people they’ve never met.
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The tone of this post is so aggro. The cover is fun. The quote by the illustrator sounds appropriately self deprecating. No true hipster would even admit to being identified as a hipster, certainly not in print.