On 11 April 2009, the youthful cultural journal n+1 held a symposium at the New School in New York. The topic that detained almost 200 people for more than two hours on an exceedingly rainy afternoon was "hipsters". Not the once fashionable cut of trousers, but that modern breed of achingly with-it urban trendy. The papers presented, transcripts of the discussions that followed, reviews of the event and a further set of articles written in its wake are what constitute this "memorial" volume. As editor Mark Greif notes in his preface, the whole project might be regarded as either a joke or just the kind of knowing exercise wannabe hipsters would perpetrate.

In the timeframe suggested here, the contemporary hipster first raises a trucker cap-clad head in the late 1990s. Initially spied supping Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in a wife-beater vest and grooving to Johnny Cash and Journey in a few select enclaves on the Lower East Side and in Williamsburg (or Shoreditch), this figure's quasi-ironic retro aesthetic had entered the mainstream by about 2003, the year American Apparel, the brand most closely identified with the hipster look, opened its first stores. While the style's sheer ubiquity should really have rendered it passé by now, what appears most to alarm Greif and some of his cohorts is its stubborn endurance.

Hipster-hating has become, if not hip per se, then an equally and correspondingly widespread phenomenon. And over the course of these pages, plenty of dubious spleen is vented in their direction. (At one point, Slavoj Zizek is treated to a kicking, largely, it seems, for being the only intellectual American Apparel's till staff have heard of.) Other contributors, however, confess to minor midlife crises and a certain nostalgia for the days of the Face, when coolness was a more elusive phenomenon than it is today.

Maureen Tkacik is not alone in seeing parallels between the deregulation of this subculture via the internet and the financial crisis. Elsewhere, there are some quite interminably hoary discussions about authenticity, while the question of race and gentrification is an open sore that is prodded repeatedly, if rarely to edifying effect.

A tone of conservative puritanism becomes especially shrill in Greif's own "Epitaph for the White Hipster", an essay that invites us to admire the frugality of the author for buying new dress shirts annually from Filene's. The hipster, one ultimately concludes, is, as Jace Clayton puts it, really just "a straw man in skinny jeans", a punchbag for a broader range of consumer anxieties and civic ills

To buy What Was the Hipster? go to nplusonemag.com/pamphlets