It's Square To Be Hip

Once again, I find myself hearing invective directed at hipsters.

I've heard others make the point, and I think it's a good one: it's not really clear who hipsters are. It's not like Mods vs Rockers where everyone hates the other group but both sides are well defined and admit to who they are. In this case, no one really admits to being a hipster, and has only a vague collection of stereotypes to identify them. Yet all are absolutely sure that they hate these people.

It reminds me of my high school years, where there was a great deal of anger directed at "preps" even though my small-town high school didn't really have anyone that would qualify as truly preppy. Some students were better dressed than others, but hardly qualified on the global scale of preppiness.

I've occasionally referred to myself as a hipster, though that is, at best, just a joking shot at my less-than-mainstream tastes, and, at worst, ironic. Of course, hipsters themselves are ironic, so ironically calling yourself a hipster makes you a hipster, surely. And they also hate to belong to groups, so if you hate hipsters, that also makes you a hipster. So one way or another, we're all hipsters. But that just makes it more confusing that we all hate them.

So what do we hate about hipsters? Some don't like the prospect of being judged. Hipsters have, at their most basic, defined what is and is not hip, and the assumption is that the standards are rather high and inaccessible.

There's also the sense of pretension. Certainly on the few times I've looked down on people for being hipsters, it's because they had a very artificial appearance that seemed to be working too hard to attain a particular image.

But here's the nonsensical part of those worries: they're no different from our everyday social concerns. Worried your cultural choices won't live up to hipsters' standards? That's what we all go through all the time: following other people's ideas of what to wear, watch, and listen to. As for the idea that hipsters are pretentious and artificial, you've surely noticed that all trends are just as fake, but we can't see it when we're inside the trend.

Of course, none of this justifies whatever negative behaviour you might have seen from people you identified as hipsters. But realize that they are no worse than anyone else. If anything, they deserve credit for choosing their own culture instead of just accepting the one that was thrust upon us. I'd like to think of them as chickens coming home to roost: they are to our culture what our culture is to us.

Forever Disaster

Did you know that Adidas is an acronym of All Day I Dream About Sport? No? Good, 'cause it's just an urban myth. It's actually a contraction of the founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler.  Well his brother, Rudolf didn't get along with him, and left to start his own company, Puma.  How about that?  You have a successful multinational shoe company, and it's only the second biggest multinational shoe company in the family.

So it's fitting that Puma has always been the poor cousin to the big boys of sports footwear. The only organized sports I ever participated in - playing soccer as a child - was in Puma shoes. So when I was entering my teens, at about the time the marketing Svengalis at Nike convinced everyone in my generation that shoes were the determiner of athletic prowess and social status. Here I was, the closest connection I had to this suddenly important world of shoes was through the ones cheap enough to be sold at Zellers, the Go-Bots to Nike's Transformers.

But now Puma is going to try constructing a bad-ass image for itself with a new ad campaign. And someone in PR decided they'd do it with athletes in hot-tubs.  In their trying-too-hard ad, you probably recognized Usain Bolt.  If you follow soccer, you recognized Mario Balotelli and possibly Marta.  And I had to look it up, and the woman who is about to take a two-stroke penalty for taking the putter in the tub with her is Lexi Thompson.  And I don't know why they have footage of Formula 1 pit stop either.

The whole thing seems like a miscalculation, even before you find out that Thompson is only 19.  Like I say, its attempt to look rebellious is really over the top.  But it's also not really believable from mostly likeable athletes. Yes, Balotelli has enough sinisterness for all of them, but that leads to the biggest problem.  The scene of him in the hot-tub is the creepiest thing I've ever seen.  There he is, with a hint of a grin of self satisfaction, with his arms around a couple of early-round-losers from a Taylor Swift impersonation contest, speaking for him in bubbly voices with Borg-like unison.  Yes, I know it was probably just something they threw together when the ad's director discovered he can't speak English, but now I'm going to go out and buy some Adidas shoes just so everyone knows I'm not involved with this.

Dog And Big Pony Show

In one of my High School English classes we had a unit on media literacy.  It was a pretty forward-thinking move for the time, but now I realize it was just a mangled summary of Marshal McLuhan's theories.  And of course the media has grown more complex, ubiquitous, and devious since then.  Teaching kids to consider the message of advertising seems quaint now.

Certainly, I've found that I have to reach far beyond that unit to make sense of today's advertising. And even then a lot of it makes no sense.  We were taught that commercials portray an unrealistic ideal of the customer.  That is, you sell beer by showing a good-looking successful person drinking the beer.  But now, most beer ads show losers you wouldn't want to associate with.  The only one with an idealized drinker is the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man In The World" campaign, and they use the ploy in an ironically obvious way.

And there's this Ralph Lauren ad:

I'm still trying to understand who this is aimed at. It's apparently appealing to a man who likes the following:

• The sport of polo
• Tiny vintage sports cars
• Bright colours
• The music of OneRepublic
• The professional sports being shown when this ad runs
• Yachting
• Skydiving
• Football
• Hanging out with black people
• Women
• Dressing as a comically stereotypical rich person
• Shopping at mainstream department stores.

I'm not sure these people exist.

Training Camp

A while back I was discussing throwback uniforms in sports, and I made a throw-away suggestion that teams should make up fake throwback outfits, rather than some of the ugly or forgettable uniforms they use now.  I didn't expand on that idea, but I was also thinking that some of the newer teams should create their own fake old-fashioned uniforms. It turns out that the Tampa Bay Rays have done exactly that: they've created outfits that are a pretty convincing example of what the team would have worn around 1980, if not for the fact that the team was actually created in 1998. Better still, these uniforms have become known as "fauxbacks" which should ensure it will become a trend.

Good for them. I award them one free exemption from my cursing them for either their ugly stadium, or continually defeating my Blue Jays. Speaking of which, that's kind of who I was expecting would start the trend: a team like the Jays, founded in the sixties or seventies, creating fake uniforms from the twenties and thirties since those are regarded as the game's golden age (by white people.)

So now I predict the next trend: the really famous, iconic teams - the Yankees and Celtics of the world that never change their uniforms - will have throwbacks to the uniforms they might have had in previous eras. They'll show what they would have worn to chase the trends, if they weren't "better" than all that.  Here are a couple of suggestions:

Since these are fake uniforms that are indulging in the tackiness of the past, I dub them "fauxtacks." I look forward to all the expensive players in this kitschy clothing.

Poorly Dressed Superman

With this new Superman movie, some people are complaining about the liberties they've taken with the traditional costume.  The colours aren't as bright, and he no longer has the red shorts.  I'd prefer to think that after his many years on Earth, Superman has finally figured out that humans prefer to wear their underwear on the inside.  And if he can eventually get the problem with red shorts and clashing bright blue and red, then there's hope for the rest of us.  In particular, there's hope for the New York Rangers, who have made the same fashion faux pas for a similar period of time.

But the big problem with the lack of red underwear is that, well, it's clearer that it's not just his muscles that are bulging.  That confuses me: wasn't it a big part of Superman II that he couldn't "love" a woman unless he became human?  But it is ironic that the traditional Superman costume actually disguised his masculine features; that would surprise those folks in the 50's who though that superhero comics were promoting homosexuality.

But the change that no one is talking about is the fabric.  Back in the Christopher Reeve movies, the suit material seemed to be featureless and smooth.  Then in Superman Returns, it acquired a rough texture.  Now it's some sort intricate chainmail.  The same thing happened in the new Star Trek movies, where the Star Fleet uniforms have some sort of thick weave.  Is this the new fashion, or are the movie makers just revelling in the detail afforded by high-definition?  Or maybe this is how we see the future now.  It used to be that the future was smooth and shiny, but now it's rough and intricate.  I blame carbon fibre.

Steel Wheels

What's the deal with all the cars I keep seeing without hubcaps?  I hope people aren't removing them thinking that they're saving gas by removing weight or something.  Or maybe it's a statement in favour of a practical aesthetic over unnecessary decoration.  When you think about it, thin plastic hubcaps are as useless as vinyl roofs.  More likely, they're intimidated by the giant alloy wheels you see on cars with half-inch-think tires.

The other possibility is that people are stealing hubcaps, and we're just seeing the victims driving around with bare-steel wheels.  Though that wouldn't make much sense: they've stolen so many hubcaps, that there are lots of cars driving around without hubcaps, so people like me think its a trend, so we don't want to buy hubcaps, so the hubcap thieves are stuck with thousands of hubcaps they can't sell.

Whichever explanation is correct, it's embarrassing that my car still has its hubcaps: Either I'm out of style for keeping them on the car, or the hubcap thieves think mine aren't worth stealing.

Aging Progress

I think I've figured out exactly how it is that old people come to feel old.  See I was just waiting to cross the street at a stoplight, and I saw an old lady walking towards me on the sidewalk.  But as she approached, I started to realize that she wasn't old; in fact, she was younger than me.

So how could I have made such a mistake?  It was her sunglasses.  She was wearing giant, round sunglasses.  Those are stylish now, but I have years of experience thinking of then as old-lady-glasses.

And that's the maturity dilemma.  As I recently observed, once you get to pushing forty, you've seen everything be in and out at least once, and fashion is no longer instinctual.  And once you have to think about it, it becomes to easy to just say screw it, I'm wearing something comfortable.