He Complained — and Proved Himself Wrong
If you’re a man going to a job interview, here’s a quick rule of thumb: wear a suit and tie. Employers will rarely criticize you for being overdressed — you’re putting your best foot forward — but many will reject you if they think you’re attire suggests you’re not taking the opportunity seriously. Similarly, it probably benefits you to be clean-shaven or, if you have facial hair, ensure that it’s tidy — neat and organized reflects better on you than being disheveled.
Nothing in the above should be groundbreaking or controversial, but there are definitely people who aren’t fans of those informal rules and outright reject them. Sometimes, these people are called “hipsters.” If you’re not familiar with the term, Merriam-Webster, the iconic American dictionary, defines it as “a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns” and is particularly interested in bucking fashion norms for avant-garde attire. The term is often viewed as a pejorative within hipster subculture, largely because nonconformity is a calling card for them, and one-size-fits-all labels and nonconformity don’t mix.
And in 2019, that led to an embarrassing admission by one person who really, really, didn’t want to be called a hipster.
The problem started with a research study by Jonathan Touboul, a math professor at Brandeis University. Touboul, using math models which we won’t go into here — but if you’re interested, don’t worry, I’ll share more momentarily — concluded that over time, nonconformists like hipsters tend to become very homogenized within their subgroups. Or, in laypeople’s terms, as Brandies Magazine explained in an article headline about Touboul’s work, “Hipsters are Conformists, Too.”
Touboul’s research captured the eye of the MIT Technology Review which ran a story titled “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same,” using the image above. The article explains a lot of the math and shares a lot of charts and graphs if you’re so interested. But one reader wasn’t very interested in the evidence Touboul used to back up his findings. Rather, that reader was upset about the image the MIT Technology Review used — again, that’s the one shared above — to show what a “typical” hipster looked like. Here’s what that complaining reader wrote to Gideon Lichfield, the Review’s editor-in-chief at the time (via NPR):
You used a heavily edited Getty image of me for your recent bit of click-bait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article and somewhat ironically about five years too late to be as desperately relevant as it is attempting to be. By using a tired cultural trope to try to spruce up an otherwise disturbing study. Your lack of basic journalistic ethics and both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response and I am of course pursuing legal action.
That’s a pretty damning accusation — except for one problem. As Litchfield explained to NPR, “Lichfield and his team quickly checked to see if the model in the photo signed a model release. They contacted Getty Images [the company that provided the photo], which found that the person who signed the model release was not the person who wrote the angry email.”
Oops.
The complaining reader had, accidentally, helped prove Touboul’s thesis true. But to the emailer’s credit, he didn’t dig in his heels when faced with the truth. Per NPR, the Review replied to him to share their findings, and he accepted that he had made a mistake, writing: “Wow, I stand corrected I guess. I and multiple family members, and a childhood friend pointed it out to me, thought it was a mildly photo-shopped picture of me. I even have a very similar hat and shirt, though in full color I can see it’s not the same. Thank you for getting back to me and resolving the issue.”
The damage to hipsterdom, though, was already done. As Litchfield told the CBC, “I think [the whole ordeal] says what the study says, which is that hipsters all look alike.”
Bonus fact: In the 1960s, the Canada Council for the Arts wanted to challenge “the four pillars of society: money, status, respectability, and conformity,” according to the Candian publication The Tyee. Their solution? Hire a former social worker to dress up like a court jester and go around Vancouver and just be a big old nuisance. Per the article, the Jester, Joachim Folks, “spent his days in the courthouse square speaking with anyone willing to talk. He petitioned City Council to institute a ‘Fool Tax’ (one cent per ordinary citizen, and two cents per politician). He held street parties for the residents of the Downtown Eastside. He attended the annual general meeting of the Architectural Institute of B.C. with a troupe of mimes and a loaf of bread. He purchased a wagon drawn by donkeys, and drove it up Cambie Street in the middle of rush hour. And, for his commitment to the ridiculous, he enjoyed a level of celebrity that transcended his surroundings, being profiled by the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, and finally finding himself in 1969′s Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook.” Fokls was paid $3,500 (annually or one-time, it’s unclear) for his efforts.
From the Archives: Harry Potter and the Uniform of Temporal Distortion: How a famous actor used a keen sense of fashion to frustrate the paparazzi.