A hipstory

1862

Captain Frederick Pabst marries Maria Best, and buys into her father’s Milwaukee brewing company two years later. In 1882, his award-winning suds come with a blue ribbon, thus birthing the hipster’s favorite beer—Pabst Blue Ribbon.

1897

The Chicago Tribune reports on “flippant youth” wearing slogan tees such as ones reading no flies on me. Can punk in drublic or zero to horny in 2.5 beers or don’t blame me, i voted for taft be far behind?

1917

Converse introduces the “All-Star,” later dubbed the “Chuck Taylor All-Star.” The supersmelly fungus huts are popular—and unpopular, and then popular, and then unpopular, and then popular again—in every decade to come.

1944

The word hipster—a.k.a. “a character who likes hot jazz”—first appears, in a glossary of jive expressions that accompanies Harry Gibson’s album Boogie Woogie in Blue.

1950s

John Deere introduces its signature hat, with a foam front and mesh backing. It would father the trucker hat, which would father Punk’d.

1966

Ninety-pound British model Twiggy (née Lesley Hornby) makes her first appearance in a photo shoot. Thin is forever in.

1970

Urban Outfitters is born in Philadelphia. Stocked with ’70s fashions, the store probably looked the same as it does today.

1974

Designer Vivienne Westwood and her husband, Malcolm McLaren, sell ripped T-shirts and rubber S&M clothing, launching the punk fashion movement. Spray-on jeans (and the Sex Pistols) soon follow.

1977

Elvis Costello sports his trademark dork glasses on the cover of his first album, My Aim Is True.

1981

MTV first starts searing the collective youth unconscious with a million ’80s images that will later be ironically paid tribute to.

1991

Nirvana’s Nevermind tour begins in Toronto, and Kurt Cobain becomes the reluctant icon of grunge fashion.

1996

Take everything that came before this, put it in air quotes, and you have Williamsburg. Drawn by cheapo rents, artists had been moving there since the 1970s, and by the mid-’90s, they predominated, waving an ironic retro look as their flag.

2002

The hipster style permeates the mainstream: Celebs and teenyboppers don the Von Dutch trucker hat, worn to death by Ashton Kutcher on MTV.

2003

The New York Times declares the trucker hat “over,” which means it was over at least a year before. Meanwhile, The Boston Globe discovers its local kids are drinking…PBR (which means that one’s really over). And Robert Lanham’s mocking The Hipster Handbook finishes off the whole culture. Or does it?

2007

Skinny jeans, trucker hats, Costello glasses, slogan tees, PBR, Vans, All-Stars—all are declared “dead” by the media and hipsters themselves, but are still embraced by the mainstream, as well as people who look like “hipsters” but simply consider themselves cool. What’s next?

2008

The powdered wig makes a comeback.

More in the Hipster Issue:

• Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool
• Why the hipster must die: The hipsterati talks back: We asked hipster-leaning bloggers to defend their constituency. See what they said.
• Why the hipster must die: Your responses: We've declared war on the hipster. Now it's time for you to pick a side.
• A hipstory: View a timeline on how this monster was created.
• Hipster quiz: The first sign of hipsterdom is self-denial. Take our quiz and get your hipster rating.
• Cool or played out?: We name 20 recent hipster markers; you vote on whether they have any cool value left.
• Name that hipster: The train that cuts across the greatest swath of hipsterdom is not the L—God, that's so two years ago—it's the G. See if you can match these swingin' youth to the stop where we caught them.
• Hipster detox: Quick impressions: See how three New York hipsters coped with two weeks of mainstream living.
• Hipster detox: Full assessment: After two weeks of ditching his Union Pool-and-Proust lifestyle, our resident cool guy breaks down his new life as a "reg."
• True originals: To look at them, you wouldn’t think these New Yorkers are hip. But then you find out what they did last night. We asked an octogenarian jazz maven, an avant-garde dance critic and Russell Simmons’s artist brother about NYC cool.
• Cool as shhh: The truly “hip” stuff is unpretentious and off the radar—until TONY reports it and ruins everything. So we thought we’d make amends with these blind-item tips.
• Cool as shhh: Guess the answers: Do you know what's cool in this city? Then prove it.
• Special Hipster-Issue Seek: Guest editor edition