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Everyone agreed that the hipster had it coming. For someone more concerned with recherché ways of making coffee than harming his fellow man, he had made a lot of enemies. You could tell from the graffiti that had begun to appear under viaducts — ‘Hipsters Go Home’, ‘Dear Hipsters, You Still Suck’ and ‘Hipsters Die’ — or the online hate blogs such as Hackney Hipster Hate, Look at This F***in’ Hipster, Keep Calm and Kill all Hipsters.

However, the London hipster had survived many attempts on his life in his long spell as a social stereotype and young men still seemed to want to adopt the same beards, tattoos, check shirts, retro glasses, fixed-wheel bikes and curiously passive-aggressive approach to cool. There are hipster females, but they have never inspired the same venom as the male of the species.

But in the end, like Napoleon and Hitler before him, it seems that the hipster was simply operating on too many fronts. Hipster signifiers are everywhere. Pizza Hut now serves cocktails in jam jars. Premier League footballers have sailor tattoos. Craft beer is used to measure the rate of inflation. Peak beard has long since been passed. Your dad has his hair cut in Murdock. No tastemaker can survive that kind of ubiquity.

‘These hipsters,’ complained the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett recently, ‘you hear these idiotic conversations come out of them and you think, “God, it’s just dressing up.” ’ The insiders have conducted their own postmortems and decided that anything distressed and retro is out, while sports-luxe, futurism and normcore (dressing as anonymously as possible) are in. Cool people no longer want to look accidentally the same, they want to look deliberately the same.

As word of the hipster’s demise spread down Kingsland Road (London’s hipster thoroughfare), the mood could be summarised as cautious disbelief — much as 18th-century travellers in Essex must have felt when they heard that the highwayman Dick Turpin was no more. ‘The hipster is dead? Really?’ said the man cutting my hair in a not-cheap Hackney salon (himself conspicuously free of hipster signifiers). He reflected that the dip-dyes and Peaky Blinders hairdos that are a hipster’s typical request did seem to be on the decline. ‘About time, too,’ he added. ‘They’ve bloody ruined this area. I can’t afford to live here any more.’

Who killed the hipster? Meet the suspects 9 show all Who killed the hipster? Meet the suspects 1/9 Suspect 1: Kale The first wave of East London hipsters subsisted on crisps and blagged cocaine. The second wave grazed in restaurants such as MeatLiquor. However, the health food rearguard action has seen kale sweep all before it. East London is now full of shiny places where the main drug on offer is endorphins. Frame dance studios are much hipper than electro basements. Girls writer Lena Dunham’s recent alliance with über trainer Tracy Anderson is a sign of the times. 2/9 Suspect 2: The Cutester The cute young techies from Generation Z have rounded on the hipster, too. They may have the beards and funny glasses but they’re a subtly different breed from their older brothers and sisters. If the hipster was self-consciously cool, the cutester is self-consciously anti-cool. They’re less into weird Japanese bands and ketamine and more into the Cereal Killer Café, Netflix, BuzzFeed, Tim Minchin, Secret Cinema, cosplay, Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones, Zoella, taco vans, atheist churches and Pixar movies. They have already claimed the hipster’s Shoreditch heartlands with their startups and will continue to sing ‘Everything is Awesome’ for the foreseeable future. 3/9 Suspect 3: The Internet The internet has been crucial in making the hipster a global force: a cold-pressed coffee trend will soon work its way from San Francisco to London. However, it also changed the nature of hip. In the pre-Google era, to be ‘cool’ meant you had to hang out in the right clubs, take the right drugs and talk the right talk. Now you just need to read the right blog. This accelerates the trend cycle to such a degree that anything potentially hip will be analysed to death before it has a chance to evolve. Seapunk (an aesthetic loosely inspired by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ video) lasted approximately three minutes. Health Goth (monochrome Nikes, gas masks and emotional exercise) sputtered out after one Vice article. In this context, you can see why normcore (the avoidance of anything that might be seen as trendy) is a refreshing antidote. PA 4/9 Suspect 4: The NU-Lad The original Shoreditch scene of the late 1990s formed in opposition to Britpop lad culture (which once seemed unassailable). Now, however, the lad is having an unlikely renaissance in the form of a sleek and stylised sporty look being popularised by designers such as Christopher Shannon, Y-3 and Nasir Mazhar. So let’s put on our Classics and have a little dance, shall we? (Disclaimer: if you get that reference, you’re too old to be a Nu-lad.) 5/9 Suspect 5: George Osborne OK, the Chancellor has never vowed to commit hipstacide but he does represent the socioeconomic forces that have placed the hipster under threat. As American writer Scott Timberg argues in his new book Culture Crash, the creative industries where hipsters have traditionally found work are all in decline. ‘Book editors, journalists, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and internet reset.’ Add to that low wages, arts cuts, the corporatisation of everything and sky-high property prices and you can see why so many hipsters move back in with their mum. Jeremy Selwyn 6/9 Suspect 6: Terry Richardson Few figures in fashion are more implicated in the hipster aesthetic than the photographer Terry Richardson — now notorious for a string of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip. 7/9 Suspect 7: West Londoners When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake. 8/9 Suspect 8: The two Joeys Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex (pictured) is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed. 9/9 Suspect 10: Hipsters Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us. Iconica/Getty Images 1/9 Suspect 1: Kale The first wave of East London hipsters subsisted on crisps and blagged cocaine. The second wave grazed in restaurants such as MeatLiquor. However, the health food rearguard action has seen kale sweep all before it. East London is now full of shiny places where the main drug on offer is endorphins. Frame dance studios are much hipper than electro basements. Girls writer Lena Dunham’s recent alliance with über trainer Tracy Anderson is a sign of the times. 2/9 Suspect 2: The Cutester The cute young techies from Generation Z have rounded on the hipster, too. They may have the beards and funny glasses but they’re a subtly different breed from their older brothers and sisters. If the hipster was self-consciously cool, the cutester is self-consciously anti-cool. They’re less into weird Japanese bands and ketamine and more into the Cereal Killer Café, Netflix, BuzzFeed, Tim Minchin, Secret Cinema, cosplay, Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones, Zoella, taco vans, atheist churches and Pixar movies. They have already claimed the hipster’s Shoreditch heartlands with their startups and will continue to sing ‘Everything is Awesome’ for the foreseeable future. 3/9 Suspect 3: The Internet The internet has been crucial in making the hipster a global force: a cold-pressed coffee trend will soon work its way from San Francisco to London. However, it also changed the nature of hip. In the pre-Google era, to be ‘cool’ meant you had to hang out in the right clubs, take the right drugs and talk the right talk. Now you just need to read the right blog. This accelerates the trend cycle to such a degree that anything potentially hip will be analysed to death before it has a chance to evolve. Seapunk (an aesthetic loosely inspired by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ video) lasted approximately three minutes. Health Goth (monochrome Nikes, gas masks and emotional exercise) sputtered out after one Vice article. In this context, you can see why normcore (the avoidance of anything that might be seen as trendy) is a refreshing antidote. PA 4/9 Suspect 4: The NU-Lad The original Shoreditch scene of the late 1990s formed in opposition to Britpop lad culture (which once seemed unassailable). Now, however, the lad is having an unlikely renaissance in the form of a sleek and stylised sporty look being popularised by designers such as Christopher Shannon, Y-3 and Nasir Mazhar. So let’s put on our Classics and have a little dance, shall we? (Disclaimer: if you get that reference, you’re too old to be a Nu-lad.) 5/9 Suspect 5: George Osborne OK, the Chancellor has never vowed to commit hipstacide but he does represent the socioeconomic forces that have placed the hipster under threat. As American writer Scott Timberg argues in his new book Culture Crash, the creative industries where hipsters have traditionally found work are all in decline. ‘Book editors, journalists, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and internet reset.’ Add to that low wages, arts cuts, the corporatisation of everything and sky-high property prices and you can see why so many hipsters move back in with their mum. Jeremy Selwyn 6/9 Suspect 6: Terry Richardson Few figures in fashion are more implicated in the hipster aesthetic than the photographer Terry Richardson — now notorious for a string of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip. 7/9 Suspect 7: West Londoners When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake. 8/9 Suspect 8: The two Joeys Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex (pictured) is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed. 9/9 Suspect 10: Hipsters Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us. Iconica/Getty Images

Then again, just as hipster trends such as overly hoppy beer and places with ampersands in their name have percolated into the mainstream, so, too, have anti-hipster trends. It’s always been more hip to hate hipsters than it is to be one. From the Shoreditch Twat moniker (1999) and the sitcom Nathan Barley (2005) to the n+1 magazine’s publication of What was the Hipster? (2009) and the immortal ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’ song (2010), the hipster has been mocked throughout his existence.

Political commentators have never been entirely sure about the hipster either. Last year Will Self issued a lament about the ‘awful cult of the talentless hipster’ in the lefty New Statesman — and blamed his own fifty-something generation for presiding over the ‘commodification of the counterculture’. Harry Mount echoed him in the righty Spectator, too, describing hipsterism as ‘conformity dressed up as non-conformity’.

The hipsters, runs the usual critique, disguise themselves as creators when they are merely curators. They have revolutionary taste but not revolutionary spirit. It’s the spring of 1968 as referenced by an MC5 T-shirt from Urban Outfitters; the wild energies of the 1920s as channelled through an Art Deco biscuit tin; the futurism of the 1980s as seen through a retro computer game.

And so the term has now become so vague as to be almost meaningless. It’s often used to undermine young people, a little like ‘chav’ is used to undermine poor people. I’ve seen phenomena as diverse as Mumford & Sons, ketamine, almond milk, Penguin Classics, gentrification, pulled pork, Jeremy Paxman’s beard, FKA Twigs, apathy, tortoiseshell glasses, Cath Kidston, Lucky Charms frosted cereal and Generation Y as a whole described as hipster.

Still, we won’t have full closure on any of this until we work out who actually killed it for the hipster in the end. And as the artfully distressed funeral cortege passes Old Street roundabout, there are a number of suspects still at large…

WHO KILLED THE HIPSTER?

Suspect 1

KALE

The first wave of East London hipsters subsisted on crisps and blagged cocaine. The second wave grazed in restaurants such as MeatLiquor. However, the health food rearguard action has seen kale sweep all before it. East London is now full of shiny places where the main drug on offer is endorphins. Frame dance studios are much hipper than electro basements. Girls writer Lena Dunham’s recent alliance with über trainer Tracy Anderson is a sign of the times.

Suspect 2

THE CUTESTER

The cute young techies from Generation Z have rounded on the hipster, too. They may have the beards and funny glasses but they’re a subtly different breed from their older brothers and sisters. If the hipster was self-consciously cool, the cutester is self-consciously anti-cool. They’re less into weird Japanese bands and ketamine and more into the Cereal Killer Café, Netflix, BuzzFeed, Tim Minchin, Secret Cinema, cosplay, Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones, Zoella, taco vans, atheist churches and Pixar movies. They have already claimed the hipster’s Shoreditch heartlands with their startups and will continue to sing ‘Everything is Awesome’ for the foreseeable future.

Suspect 3

THE INTERNET

The internet has been crucial in making the hipster a global force: a cold-pressed coffee trend will soon work its way from San Francisco to London. However, it also changed the nature of hip. In the pre-Google era, to be ‘cool’ meant you had to hang out in the right clubs, take the right drugs and talk the right talk. Now you just need to read the right blog. This accelerates the trend cycle to such a degree that anything potentially hip will be analysed to death before it has a chance to evolve. Seapunk (an aesthetic loosely inspired by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ video) lasted approximately three minutes. Health Goth (monochrome Nikes, gas masks and emotional exercise) sputtered out after one Vice article. In this context, you can see why normcore (the avoidance of anything that might be seen as trendy) is a refreshing antidote.

Suspect 4

THE NU-LAD

The original Shoreditch scene of the late 1990s formed in opposition to Britpop lad culture (which once seemed unassailable). Now, however, the lad is having an unlikely renaissance in the form of a sleek and stylised sporty look being popularised by designers such as Christopher Shannon, Y-3 and Nasir Mazhar. So let’s put on our Classics and have a little dance, shall we? (Disclaimer: if you get that reference, you’re too old to be a Nu-lad.)

Sleek and sporty: A Y-3 Menswear model at Paris Fashion Week 2015 (Picture: Dominique Charriau/Getty)

Suspect 5

GEORGE OSBORNE

OK, the Chancellor has never vowed to commit hipstacide but he does represent the socioeconomic forces that have placed the hipster under threat. As American writer Scott Timberg argues in his new book Culture Crash, the creative industries where hipsters have traditionally found work are all in decline. ‘Book editors, journalists, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and internet reset.’ Add to that low wages, arts cuts, the corporatisation of everything and sky-high property prices and you can see why so many hipsters move back in with their mum.

Suspect 6

TERRY RICHARDSON

Few figures in fashion are more implicated in the hipster aesthetic than the photographer Terry Richardson — now notorious for a string of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip.

Suspect 7

WEST LONDONERS

When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake.

Suspect 8

THE TWO JOEYS

Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed.

Suspect: Joey Barton (Picture: Paul Gilham/Getty)

Suspect 9

TIME

‘Time is a great teacher; unfortunately it kills its pupils,’ said the composer Hector Berlioz. And time caught up with hipsters eventually. If you were fresh out of art school when the whole Shoreditch scene kicked off, you’d now be pushing 40 — and probably watching Peppa Pig with your small children Wolf and Enid in Hastings or Margate, while wondering if you could make a go of a coffee business on the seafront.

Suspect 10

HIPSTERS

Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us.

Photograph by Charlie Surbey, styled by Sophie Paxton. Stylist’s assistant: Sarah-Rose Harrison. Beard groomed by Danni Hooker at LHA Represents. With thanks to Charles H Fox for supplying the beard and moustache (020 7240 3111). Schindelhauer Siegfried bike, £1,395, at velorution.com. Beanie, £12, Urban Outfitters (urbanoutfitters.com). Glasses, £295, Cutler and Gross at mrporter.com. Shirt, £85, J Crew at mrportercom. Jeans, £190, Incotex at mrporter.com. Rucksack, £90, Herschel Supply Co at urbanoutfitters.com. Socks, £7, Pringle at sockshop.co.uk. Trainers, £50, Converse (converse.co.uk)