n+1 has a marvelous send-up of the hipster-as-epithet:
Epitaph for the White Hipster The uncanny thing about the early-period white hipsters is that symbolically, in their clothes, styles, and music and attitudes, they seemed to announce that whiteness was flowing back in [to the city]. Unconsciously, they wore what they were — because for reasons mysterious to the participants, those things suddenly seemed cool.
link: n+1: What Was the Hipster?
Well worth reading!
A little shallow, present-minded, too New Yorky, too influenced by the Internet. A vastly better and still relevant piece is Norman Mailer’s late-1950s essay “The White Negro,” maybe most available in “Advertisements for Myself.” To Mailer the true hipster is an authentic dissident, not just someone who dresses, reads, parties or talks that way. A David Riesman phrase from the same period comes to mind: the Billyburg hipster is a part of “the herd of independent minds.” S/he doesn’t come from a mass-consumption bohemia, avoids it because it’s boring. No one goes there anymore because it’s too crowded: Yogi Berra. Silence, exile, cunning: James Joyce. Something a true Mailer-style hipster would prolly never do: write for n+1. S/he is not ambivalent or a self-hater or -parodier.