Harry Mount

It’s time to shave that beard: the decade of the hipster is over

Fashion cults are nothing new, but this one was exceptionally silly and unoriginal

issue 25 October 2014

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[/audioplayer]Calling all hipsters, it’s time to get the razor out! You have hit peak beard. You’ve had a decade of getting away with those narrow, short trousers and the studiously thought-out socks; with the Victorian archdeacon beards and the shaven sides to your heads.

It wasn’t even that good while it lasted. Like gay fashionistas — but without any humour or bite — the hipsters stood in front of the wardrobe for an age every morning. And then proceeded to pick out random combinations of clothes straight from the £1 reject basket in a rural Norfolk branch of Help the Aged: Barbours, cable-knit cardies and jumpers from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, twinned with Clark Kent specs. As Reuben Dangoor put it in his inspired YouTube attack, ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’, hipsters dress like nerds without getting the grades.

All fashion depends for its survival on a group of misguided lemmings who live for conformity dressed up as anti-conformity.

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