Marching to an indie tune

Trends-forecasters around the globe are hailing the end of forward motion in popular culture. Pop culture has entered its old age, slowed down and started looking back on its chequered past.

With global, instant access to information, communication, music libraries and everything on YouTube, image-conscious people are playing endless pick-and-mix with decades of cultural ephemera, standing out — or blending in — by mixing and matching references to different ages, different subcultures, different countries, self-consciously avoiding any 'look' or image that has been marketed by global brands.

Picture a 30ish affluent male with severe short back-and-sides, Ernest Shackleton, Victorian polar explorer-type bushy beard, 1970s Wayfarer shades, an American hip-hop band T-shirt, under the kind of shirt Don Draper might wear to the beach, vintage 1950s jeans and school sports sneakers, and you're looking at one example of the 'hipster'.

As with many tribes, it's hard to find a hipster who'll describe himself as one. He'll point to other people who look very similar to him — "They're hipsters, I'm just fashionably dressed" — and yet the word 'hipster' itself is satisfyingly vague.

First coined during the 1940s jazz scene, the precise definition has evolved through pop-culture history. A hipster is hip — but not pinned down to any particular style.

Douglas Haddow, a 28-year-old Canadian writer, describes hipsters as a "lost generation", claiming the hipster "represents the end of Western civilisation — a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new".

Hipsters are clearly easy to hate. Time magazine was unable to keep the sneer from its voice when it described them in 2009: "Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care."

The pillars of hipsterdom​

But there's a reason the hipster drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon. For all his endless borrowing and lack of imagination, the notion of authenticity is absolutely crucial to him. Pabst is a cool beer because it's the last surviving old-fashioned, retro beer brand that's been forgotten by the global brewing corporations. Choosing it is a very self-conscious and visible rejection of mainstream marketing and the brands and lifestyles it attempts to sell.

Closely linked to authenticity is the second pillar of hipsterdom: an indie aesthetic. The current version of hipster grew out of the indie music scene, and that sensibility of rejecting anything from a major label runs across everything they buy.

A further defining feature of the hipster trend is a need to demonstrate a little maturity. Fifteen years ago, the hipster would have been wearing a Scooby Doo T-shirt and drinking alcopops, defiantly refusing to grow up. But now, mainstream culture is infantilised — parents want to be friends with their kids, TV ads talk to us as kids, health and safety culture treats us like kids, and we're obsessed with youth. Going against the grain, that Ernest Shackleton beard and Don Draper leisure shirt say the hipster is a man, not a boy.

All these traits are on display where hipsters gather to drink, which they do in great numbers in Stoke Newington, north London, where I live. I have observed the hipster at close quarters, and the things I've noticed are borne out by others.

The hipster invasion​

My local pubs, the Jolly Butchers and the White Hart, are full of hipsters, particularly at weekends. These places have an understated, unpretentious cool about them —

the hipster hates anything that's trying too hard — and they sell lots of cask ale.

The Jolly Butchers opened 16 months ago with eight handpumps on the bar. It serves real ales from local microbreweries in the classic dimple-handled jug. Many would see this glassware as hopelessly naff. The hipster sees it as old school, authentic, and therefore cool.

"Hipsters definitely think the Jolly Butchers is a cool pub," says bar manager Emma Cole. "The thing is, it's the cask ales that made it cool — and now we're getting a secondary crowd who come here because it's cool, but they don't know that it's the beer that made it cool."

A couple of miles down the road in Shoreditch, which really is hipster central, Ed Mason and his business partner Steve Taylor have opened Mason & Taylor, another bar focusing on cask ales from local brewers that looks very different from the typical cask-ale pub.

"We wanted to open a freehouse so we could stock the beers we want, but those places aren't easy to find in London. The one we found was in a new-build, so we didn't want to create some faux-pub in there, we wanted to be honest and authentic. We had to work with what we had, so we left a lot of exposed concrete, kept it modern, stylish but understated, not trying too hard."

This aesthetic runs through to many of the brands stocked. All the beers are from small, independent breweries, most of them local. And one of the best sellers from this range displays design principles that are consistent with the place itself.

The Kernel brewery was set up in 2010 in Tower Bridge by Evin O'Riordan. Kernel's beers are big, complex — as unlike mainstream brands as it's possible to get.

But the beers are also lauded for their design — even though to some people's eyes, it looks like they haven't been designed at all.

Bottle labels are seemingly printed on brown parcel wrapping paper, with the name, style and ABV blocky and smudged, as if from a home printing set.

This indie, under-stated aesthetic has helped propel the brand into delis and restaurants as well as London's most stylish pubs and bars.

Sophisticated spirits​

But hipsters don't just drink beer. Premium spirits give them that perfect sense of grown-up sophistication.

Hendrick's gin pre-dates the current hipster trend, but fits perfectly with it — its world of

Victorian curios, consistent at every point in the brand's presentation, gives hipsters a useful element for their pick-and-mix palate, and it feels unashamedly like a grown-

up brand.

Sailor Jerry's rum, with its West Coast tattoo parlour chic, is also a perfect hipster brand. It grew in the pubs and bars of east London by word of mouth before taking some of that cool onto a broader stage.

New brand launches in premium spirits are adopting a similar sense of quirky authenticity and independent chic that redefines 'premium' away from designer-label cocktail bars.

The Kraken is a new black, spiced rum packaged in a distinctive 70cl Victorian 'flagon-style' clear glass bottle. It looks great, unlike anything else on the bar, and the taste is definitely for grown-ups.

But for quirky looks, the prize has to go to Crystal Head, a brand new vodka that comes seemingly in a pure crystal skull. Launched by the actor Dan Aykroyd and fine artist John Alexander, the vodka has been quadruple-distilled and three-times filtered through quartz crystals. The arresting iconic skull bottle took two years to design and is based on the mystery of the 13 crystal skulls that have been found around the world, which some people believe contain healing powers.

These brands do not set out to cater specifically for hipsters, and they don't really share many common principles beyond breaking category design and marketing norms and showing a real commitment to quality.

But they do all share a slightly alternative aesthetic that appeals to the hipster's quest for authenticity, pick-and-mix, and a sense of maturity. It's an aesthetic that's redefining what 'premium' means in how pubs and bars look, how they behave, and what drinks they serve.

And while the easily-mocked arch-hipsters may be confined to the trendy postcodes of east London, in a po