The Times recently traveled out to the East End, where reporter Jim Rutenberg came across several well-placed placards featuring pictures of fedoras with a red slash through them. The fedoras, Rutenberg tells us, are supposed to represent “your basic hipster,” apparently unwelcome in the area, and even in America:
[T]o some extent, it’s just part of what is shaping up as a countrywide anti-hipster movement. Something about artisanal tattoos; a bespoke, frontiersman beard; and, yes, a fedora perched atop the head just so is sending some people around the bend.
In these parts, the image of the hipster is also a stand-in for a more deeply seated suspicion that the whole look provides cover for a more privileged crowd that is intent upon importing to your neighborhood higher real estate, food and drink prices — and a new attitude that says, “I’m richer than you, I’m hipper than you and, gosh darn it, some things are going to change around here.”
But, fedoras? They hardly capture the spirit of the hipster movement, gosh darn it. What self-respecting H-word would be caught in one of those? Or maybe that’s the point! Anyway, Rutenberg mentions that locals recently saw someone wearing a “Death to Hipsters” T-shirt. That, Montauk, was probably a hipster.
