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Karen Dacre

fashion editor of the Evening Standard, lives in Hackney

A hipster, according to the Urban Dictionary, is an individual who values independent thinking and progressive politics. It refers to he who enjoys indie rock and she who appreciates art. A hipster, the dictionary claims, is a twenty- to thirtysomething of high intelligence who rejects the “culturally ignorant” attitudes of mainstream consumers.

If we look to the New York of 1969 and to the days of Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and their fellow residents at the Hotel Chelsea, it’s easy to see how such a definition came to pass.

Fast forward to London 2013 and the entire ethos of the hipster has been altered. In fact, it’s been totally bastardised.

Today the word “hipster” is bandied about like a grotty £5 note. While Patti Smith spent a decade sporting a boy’s moth-eaten overcoat and bowl crop to earn her hipster credentials, today any man with a beard and a pair of boat shoes is labelled one. As is any woman who considers denim dungarees and a flash of red lipstick to be respectable Saturday night attire.

Where London stereotypes are concerned, hipsters and the East End go hand in hand. As do fixed-speed bikes. Essentially, if you’re young, like fashion and live beyond the Holborn side of Oxford Circus, you’re probably a hipster.

Classic London hipster clichés include drinking craft beer, mooching around food markets and taking an interest in record labels that you haven’t heard of yet.

Any self-respecting member of the tribe went to that new pub in Clapton months — if not years — before you did and is currently plotting a move to a warehouse in Walthamstow from where he will expand his popular fair trade, Mongolian monk-approved coffee cart business. Hipsters are into fashion but simultaneously think it’s ridiculous. And they wouldn’t be seen dead at a bar full of other hipsters. Or at a festival. Eughh, especially not Glastonbury.

In New York, “hipsterism” has also been augmented, namely to include the youthful residents of Brooklyn. But while this has been captured in film — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig document the tale of two Brooklyn hipsters in Frances Ha, which hits cinemas this month, and in Lena Dunham’s iconic Girls which plays out around Williamsburg’s Greenpoint and Bedford Avenue — London has yet to come up with its own cinematic alternative. Instead, a series of books — The Hipster Handbook, Stuff Hipsters Hate and Look at This F*cking Hipster — have ensured that the capital’s alternative hipsturbia gets its own time in the spotlight. So where does this leave the “real” hipsters? Are they gone forever? Today’s social networking hysteria has certainly made it almost impossible for anything to remain underground for long.

HOW TO SPOT A HACKNEY HIPSTER

The beard: it’s a dead giveaway. Must be thick and perfectly groomed

The shoes. Never new. Must be Nike Air Max 95s, Acne Pistols or worker’s boots.

Dogs, small or shaggy, are optional.

Browse the “up-cycled” furniture shops of Chatsworth Road, especially on a Sunday.

Hang around Lock 7 bike café on Broadway Market keeping your gears hidden. It’s strictly “fixy” territory.

If that fails, go to the Shacklewell Arms where hipsters are ten-a-penny.

Lauren Sherman

Brooklyn-based journalist and editor-at-large of Fashionista.com

Everyone you’ve ever met lives in Brooklyn these days. But 2013’s mass exodus from Manhattan has more to do with the outer borough’s tasty restaurants and expertly curated shops than the promise of bigger spaces and cheaper rent. (The cost of a two-bedroom flat in Cobble Hill — one of South Brooklyn’s hipster-meets-yuppie neighbourhoods — can easily equal that of a similar space on the Lower East Side.)

To make the transition into hipsterdom, you must first begin by drinking very, very expensive coffee. Maybe from Blue Bottle, and most definitely cold-brewed if you like it iced. Saturday afternoons should be spent at one of several flea markets. Possibly the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, which hawks cute-but-overpriced milk crates for storing vintage bottles and mint-condition copies of New York magazine circa 1972. While you’re there, maybe stop by French Garment Cleaners, where people-who-used-to-be-hipsters-but-are-now-creative-professionals buy APC denim skirts and Rachel Comey block heels.

Otherwise, it’s over to the Williamsburg waterfront and Smorgasburg, where dozens of food vendors feed the throngs of foodies Maine lobster rolls, artisanal ice pops and smokey brisket. Because after all, you can’t be a hipster without being a foodie, too.

Looking to go deeper? To find the real hipsters — the ones who descend from the white V-neck tee and Wallabees-wearing folks of yesteryear, aka 2003 — you’ve got to travel far beyond Williamsburg to places such as East Bushwick, Gowanus and Crown Heights. There, mustachioed braces-wearing boys and swept-fringe, Françoise Hardy-obsessed girls mix up bespoke cocktails and listen to fuzzy rock. This is where you will find your inspiration. In these places, hipsters grow their own rocket, build their own industrial shelving, and craft their own jewellery out of neon-painted metal.

But before you go, don’t forget to stop by Mast Brothers near the Williamsburg Bridge, where men who could look like extras from Witness melt chocolate from cocoa beans the proprietors picked up in the Dominican Republic, in a boat they sailed themselves.

Think that’s funny? I’m not even joking. I’m not even trying. Because the most hilarious thing about hipsters, the thing that is so far-flung and ridiculous that one can’t help but giggle, is that it’s all so earnest. If you’re not making your own chocolate from beans you harvested yourself, you’re not really living.

HOW TO SPOT A BROOKLYN HIPSTER

Look out for unwashed APC jeans. Raw denim shall not be ruined by the washing machine.

It’s Red Wing boots for boys. Rag & Bone boots for girls. And in summer, Vans or Keds, respectively.

Visit a coffee spot. In Williamsburg, you’ve got Blue Bottle and Tobey’s Estate, or Café Grumpy in Greenpoint, where Lena Dunham’s character works on Girls.

If you’re not eating tacos from La Esquina on Wythe Ave — or even better, some legit Mexican joint that your friend’s brother heard about, a place run by “actual” Mexicans — then you’re not in the right place.