K
ids these days. Which days are these? And which kids? And what is the fuss about? When a group that was used to being seen and not heard is issued a newly minted identity and given the keys to a culture, it will, without doubt, be a riotous occasion. Which kids are these? The newly minted, freshly printed kids of the 1950s. The first Kids. This, my friends, is where hipster culture began. Ever since then, hipster style has been a sartorial snowball rolling through time gathering baubles and duds from the decades that came before until hipsters could wear whatever they wanted as long as they were pissing someone off.
like Athena from Zeus’ brow. Until the 50s no one had ever heard of Youth Culture. Until the 50s you went very quickly from being a child to being engaged or working a job or both. The Ad Executives invented an identity for 18 and under in order to sell them things. Those shiny new IDs with Teenager stamped across the top looked an awful lot like credit cards. That is the first, foremost, and most pin-downable element of Youth Culture: buying shit. Think about it, when you describe a hipster, what you come up with is a series of things that can be bought; the right haircut, the right music, the right laptop, the right liberal arts
In 1948, President Truman declared an end to the extremely bad trip that was World War II. The soldiers came home to a new America. The American economy was growing up and out in all directions due to the necessity of mobilizing for the most epic conflict in human history. Not only that, but the returning GIs had been promised a piece of the action‌on paper. And boy howdy did they go to town; attending college, building houses, making money, having babies. Little did these men know those babies would grow into the first Kids. With so much more money floating around, the Ad Executives had to figure out a way of getting to it. Out of the minds of mad men sprang the Teenager
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