AFTER resisting for years, I finally gave in and began wearing glasses, mostly when I watch movies or drive (the rest of the time I go around in a tolerable fog). More upsetting than this small sign of physical decay was the acquaintance who took note of my newly bespectacled profile and said that I looked like a hipster. Mind you, the glasses are ordinary brown frames, not retro black. Architects would scoff. Yet I’d been linked to the tattooed, headphone-clad, hirsute rulers of youth culture, and insulted, because anyone who believes he is genuinely cool would never want to be called a hipster, that slavish adopter of trends.

My initial surprise was replaced by a stark realization: as a 30-something skinnyish urban male there’s almost nothing I can wear that won’t make me look like a hipster. Such is the pervasiveness of hipster culture that virtually every aspect of male fashion and grooming has been colonized.

Take footwear. Never mind that it’s largely about comfort. Every time I lace up a pair of Adidas or Vans, I might as well be saying I’m one of those hipsters with a closetful of retro ’80s street wear. Top-Siders paired with an Lacoste shirt are the realm of Vampire Weekend-type preppy hipsters. Any kind of heavy boots smack of up-with-the-working-man proletariat hipsters.

I don’t have a beard or mustache, but if I did, I’d instantly signify as the rugged breed of hipster who stalks the mountains and hollers of Williamsburg and Silver Lake.