Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez Page A

cultural movement predicated on the basic goal of being fashionable. There was no other value as dominant. It was about knowing what to listen to, knowing what to eat, knowing what to read, and knowing what to wear. Genre boundaries were obliterated. You could dress like a sixties hippie while listening to Run-D.M.C. and reading Ayn Rand. That was sort of the ideal, being as eclectic and obscure with your tastes as possible, and being an expert in everything deemed “good,” and in everything deemed not good as well, just to be safe. Punks or goths use fashion to identify themselves as part of a group,but hipsters in the abstract sense use fashion for the sake of using it. To stand out, not blend in.
    A decade into the phenomenon, hipsterdom expanded into the mainstream at an alarming pace. The “hip” dominates pop media, from movies to marketing. It penetrates the consciousness yet remains a cipher. Hipsterdom’s cultural borders are constantly shifting, or potentially nonexistent. For ten years it has largely maintained a heavy load of internal baggage. There is a strong element of self-loathing: Nothing is worse than being called a hipster, even if you are one—and at the same time, hipsters tell themselves, everyone
wants
to be one. It is the price of successful penetration: Hipsterdom cannibalizes itself, an internally built mechanism. Its death is announced every day. Hip is so mainstream it’s not even hip anymore. But don’t ever forget the important corollary: Some people still manage to be really, really hip.
    To that end, at some point in the last couple of years, it didn’t matter what city you lived in. What mattered was that you were plugged in, turned on, and had all the right tastes. When it all comes down to being fashionable, fashion becomes important. In Mexico City, that remained a relatively renegade obsession. An element of risk is central to life here, with the specter of holdups and kidnappings, with epic traffic jams, pollution, and arbitrary pauses in the water and electricity supplies. In Mexico City, living with risks translates beautifully to street fashion. The trend-conscious urban adventurers think nothing of risking a look that might register as too bold or outrageous in other places. The city’s young fashion designers take this conceit to its maximum reaches, then detonate it. New currents in clothes by young designers are
bold, aggressive, and distinctly androgynous. Clothes meant for partying.
    But there are stark differences between hipster iterations northand south of the border. In Mexico, young people may follow through close and constant Internet analysis the street-fashion trends in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and New York. But unlike many of their American counterparts, the hipsters of Mexico City make no pretense of being “poor” or “D.I.Y.” Most Mexican hipsters do not dream of living in run-down lofts in far-off, frightening reaches of the city, but prefer orderly upper-middle-class districts such as Del Valle and Coyoacán, or the established chic hoods. There is no Mexico City version of a “trailblazing” Bush-wick or South Central. In Mexico City, hipsterdom is essentially an expression of middle-class comfort.
    I begin thinking hard about this, after some months of hitting up scenester parties, night after night of free access and free drinks. I am burning out. I am seeing the same people over and over, and having the same sort of night with them, each time. In Mexico City, the coolest of the cool were still congregating and partying for the most part in one neighborhood, Condesa. Many remained proud of it. And those who weren’t had made themselves a miniculture of saying so—without ever leaving, of course. “Condesa was at its best four years ago,” Arellano tells me the day we sit down for lunch. “I’m about to leave this neighborhood. It’s too commercial, way too