http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/woman/fashion-beauty/meet-the-global-scenesters-hip-cool-and-everywhere-13941921.html
Thursday, 14 August 2008 accessed on 30/3/2011
“Today's scenesters all wear the same clothes and accessories, listen to the same sounds, ride the same bicycles, and read the same magazines, e-mailouts and style blogs.”
“For a time it seemed it would be a simple matter of shifting from London to Tokyo. But instead, street style is everywhere and in places you'd never have guessed it would be."
“a succession of styles from the past half-century, patched together to form a single, strangely familiar whole. There's a bit of Eurotrash here, some British punk there, a swatch of Asian minimalism, and a sizeable off-cut of blue-collar chic from both sides of the Atlantic.”
“American Apparel is an archetype for the globalisation of "cool". The retail chain was founded in California in 1997 with an outsider ethic.”
“The further its global reach stretches, the more easily the company can study and copy street style, before repackaging it and selling it back to the originators of that style, with an American Apparel label attached.”
“Today's music scene is a global swapshop. One of the coming bands of this year, for instance, are Johannesburg's Blk Jks, whose style choices include the global scenester's familiar Elvis Costello "dork" glasses, 1970s ski vests, vintage Nikes and, yes, skinny jeans.”
“It's no coincidence that American Apparel's often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look, nor that Vice photographer Terry Richardson is the principal photographer for Uniqlo's in-house magazine,”
“Making fun of the global scenesters is futile, for they love nothing more than to mock themselves.”
“Everything a scenester does is rendered in air quotes: ironic moustaches, ironic trucker caps, faux-offensive Urban Outfitters T-shirts, white guys with afros, or musical acts with names like Does It Offend You, Yeah?”
“The internet has been a key factor in the globalisation of hip. Through mailouts and blogs, the tropes of eclectic style tribes the world over are quickly integrated into a single street style. The keffiyeh, once a signifier of solidarity with Palestine, now signifies nothing but cool. The fixed-wheel bike is now the global scenester's favourite ride. China's cheap Holga camera, once a well-kept secret among professional photographers hoping to achieve that lo-fi look, is now an essential urban accessory.”
"Trends aren't transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be," explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. "They're now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream."
“Not even geopolitics is beyond the boundaries of cool for a global scenester: there's a vague pro-organic, anti-Bush sentiment uniting them all.”
“As this "borrowing and referencing" takes place not in capitals of cool like London but on an international scale, via the internet, the result is that same brand of individuality is sold, worn and celebrated the world over, simultaneously.”
This article talks about the hipster scene in London but describing the streets at the hub of the subculture in that city. Then the article goes on to talk about how companies sell hipsters own Ideas back to them and how though the internet a trend can cover the world in hours.
By Toby
