The hippest of haircuts in Kiev | Inna Lobas. Kiev’s hipster revolution With Russia breathing down their necks, the young seek refuge in ramen burgers and beards.

KIEV — A disc jockey spins a remix of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” on a stage by the river, while scores of young fashion brands that have sprung up in Ukraine’s capital since the revolution hawk their wares in a carnival atmosphere. T-shirts decorated with slogans like “Putin is a Dick,” “Pray for Ukraine” and “Separatist Buyer’s Club,” flap in the cool summer breeze, alongside harem pants in folk patterns, hoodies emblazoned with the Ukrainian trident, and tons of other creative knick-knacks. A vivacious girl in lensless granny glasses hands us a free cupcake for our “good vibrations” while a bearded barber from the “Tommy Gun Barbershop” offers free shaves. It’s just past noon on a summer Sunday, but Kiev Market is pumping, hipsters jostling against each other to sample the wares.

The flea market was launched just over a year ago, but has already become a fixture of the city’s booming hipster scene that has emerged since the country’s Euro Revolution.

“This European youth movement started with the Maidan. Young people realized that they needed to do something for themselves, and not depend on the government,” says Kiev Market founder Miriam Dragina, a former journalist who launched the market last year to raise funds for the Ukrainian army. She had the idea for the market while visiting Amsterdam last year, and modeled it on street markets in Europe.

“We were inspired by Moscow in the past, but now we’re moving closer to Berlin style,” she adds.

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Ukraine’s capital — once known for its glamorous nightclubs and high-heeled, overdressed women — is indeed fast turning into an “Eastern Berlin.” I remember being one of the brave few to ride a bicycle down the city’s busy streets when moving here six years ago. Now biking is the new “cool” and many bars and restaurants have bike stands; hundreds gather for midnight bike rides through the city on the weekends. Bars, which were once a foreign concept, have sprung up like mushrooms in the past year. I tried keeping track of the new bars last fall, but there are now so many Brooklyn-style watering-holes and artist hangouts that it's impossible to keep up.

One of my favorites is Druzi (“friends” in Ukrainian), a brightly-lit, open-plan bar with large plate-glass windows, stylized graffiti on its walls and... a bicycle hanging over the bar. Hipsters lie on the grass outside the bar beside their bicycles, sipping beers and mojitos and playing the occasional game of Frisbee. It’s easy to forget after a few Obolon beers that we’re in a country wracked by a war with Russia in the East. Okno, which means window in Russian, set inside the courtyard of a building in the city center, is another cult bar: Regulars lounge on beanbags, and watch the action on the ping-pong table that dominates the space. The bar’s Old Fashioned cocktail is supposed to be so good that the bartender advises against drinking it with a straw and spoiling the taste. There’s also Hashtag Bar, the rooftop Barbara Bar, Atlas, Otel, Closer, and countless others.

It’s easy to forget after a few Obolon beers that we’re in a country wracked by a war with Russia in the East.

Dogs and Tails, a SoHo-style bar-restaurant with large beams and big windows exclusively serves gourmet hot dogs, priced around $5 each. Many of the Kiev fashionista choose to eat their hot dogs with champagne. Ditto at The Burger, a stylish burger joint in the center of Kiev, where regulars wolf down New York Burgers with stylish Negroni cocktails.

As banks go bankrupt, and Western retail chains that entered Ukraine in a blaze of publicity close up shop, the center of the city is full of empty storefronts. Hipsters and others have taken over those spaces, turning them into bars, co-working spaces, and showrooms for boutique fashion brands.

“Even smaller fashion brands can now afford to open showrooms in the city center,” says Dragina from Kiev Market. “It’s the cheap rents that are driving this trend.”

“Kiev has changed so much since the revolution that it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Diana Lyubarskaya, a young actress, who now skateboards around town to various castings. “I used to want to move to Europe, but Europe has come to us instead.”

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Hipster bars and cutting-edge restaurants are just the sharp wedge, however, of the European movement shaking up a city emerging from its post-Soviet slumber. I visited Platforma Art Zavod last weekend, a formerly abandoned Soviet factory on the edges of the city that has been converted into an ambitious creative space, with galleries, artist studios, performance venues and co-working offices. A street food festival takes place there every weekend in summer and the space was packed to the gills with curious locals trying out ramen burgers, organic hot dogs, Malaysian noodles, gelatos and other nouvelle foods once associated with Brooklyn’s “Smorgasburg” food festival. Bearded hipsters lounged on beanbags in the various cafés, while some tried surfing in a shallow wave pool on the edges of the factory. Others lazed in hammocks strung between trees, or wandered the exhibitions in the factory’s refurbished halls. It felt very much like Berlin, except that the women were prettier — gorgeous, in their shorts and brightly colored trainers. It’s still Ukraine after all — a Slavic country with a flair for glamour and the high life. “You should come back here alone with your male friends,” suggested my (hipster designer) girlfriend. “You’ll have a better time.”

Hipsters are seen at the forefront of the city’s shift towards European values.

Though Kiev hipsters, like their counterparts in the West, are more affluent than common Ukrainians — culled as they are from the city’s creative classes — they’re not yet as grungy as “Western” hipsters. In Berlin, its hipster scene dominated by legendary clubs like Berghain, the dirtier and freakier the better. Kiev’s hipsters are clean and well-behaved; fewer dogs, fewer joints, fewer unattractive piercings. Their beards are perfectly trimmed, their loud T-shirts are often ironed, and they shower every day. Kiev's hipsters are often more arrogant and less friendly than the city's fast-shrinking “glamour” crowd, and are openly disdainful of what they consider the Moscow-of-the-90s inspired class, with their Porsche Cayennes and designer handbags. There are fewer wannabes among them: Hipsters are seen at the forefront of the city’s shift towards European values.

“This is all due to our mayor,” said a waitress at one of the food stands. “He’s encouraged this movement to take root.” It’s indeed true that Kiev has a new civic consciousness under its pugilist mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, who was once the world heavyweight boxing champion. The parks have been cleaned up, new benches installed on city streets, and roads repaired. There’s even a new black-clad police force about town, nicknamed “bunnies” by the locals, since they are so nice and cuddly, in contrast to the rude cops of yore.

I even spotted Klitschko at The Bar a few months back. It’s the most well-known hipster bar, and is famous for its hammocks, Polaroid photo booth and steam punk design.

Meanwhile, the Kiev market has spawned tens of imitators in the past year. There’s a music market, an organic market, a bike market, Union Square-style farmer’s market, and many others. There was even a yoga market a few months back, and a VedaLife Festival on an island in the city last week that went on for five days, with hippies shacked up in tents, meditation and yoga classes, tabla and bongo classes, reggae bands in the evenings, and much more.

“It was more like a Goa freak festival than a true Vedic experience,” complained a friend who’s also a Hare Krishna devotee.

Buro 24/7, a popular online magazine, reported recently that 20 more “hipster” bars are set to open in Kiev this fall. It attributed the rise in bars to the devil-may-care attitude of people who have nothing left to lose. There’s more than a grain of truth to their observation: With Russia breathing down their necks, a frozen conflict in the East, and the country caught in an economic death spiral, it makes sense to drink the nights away. With their finances shrinking, many young professionals are ditching their suits and expensive cars for a bike, a beard and a tattoo.

The hipster movement flourishes in the impoverished neighborhoods of the West’s high-rent metropolises. In Ukraine’s war-ravaged capital, it has come home to roost.

Vijai Maheshwari is a writer and journalist. His novel White God Factor, about Moscow in the 1990s, was published by London’s Coptic Press. He also publishes a magazine, B.East, about trends in the East, and was editor-in-chief of Playboy Russia.

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