Hipsters

Last weekend I went to a clothes market in Cochabamba, where I picked up a much-needed second pair of jeans for 30 Bs -new. I don’t know if they’re genuine Wrangler jeans or not but I certainly can’t see anything wrong with them and besides, worrying if your jeans are genuine Wranglers or not is like worrying if your Hyundai car is a genuine Hyundai or not. Nobody is likely to notice or care. [1]

I used to go to charity shops the odd time in Hackney (such as Dalston Oxfam, made famous by this guy) but usually ended up buying books or CDs rather than clothes. The men’s clothes always seemed biased towards polyester suits and plain long-sleeved t-shirts from Primark and other such boring nastiness. I don’t ever remember seeing anything as hip as, say, a t-shirt from the Soul 2 Soul 1992 “Back 2 Life” World Tour. If they had one, which they hopefully did.

Anyway, the real bargains in this market were not the jeans but the t-shirts. One hour spent browsing through huge stacks of them explained an entire decade’s worth of jokes about hipsters from “The Onion”.

The reason is that the stalls in this market source their stock from American charity shops. The stuff that doesn’t sell in the states periodically gets dumped into containers and shipped off to Bolivia where these people buy it by the kilo for half nothing.

Where the hipster aspect comes in is that it seems the majority of the stuff that the United Statesians don’t want to buy is the stuff that nobody ever paid money for in the first place. I am talking about t-shirts that were produced as corporate gifts, printed up for one-off events, given to members of sporting teams, college fraternities, clubs, societies and so forth. If Obama hadn’t got elected, I imagine Bolivia would be seeing a lot of “Yes We Can! Team Obama 2008″ t-shirts about now. [2]

There are only two sorts of people who WOULD want to pay money for these t-shirts:

a) Hipsters

b) People who don’t speak a lot of English

I didn’t realise how incredibly hipster-friendly the design and content of most of these t-shirts actually are. It is almost like the people creating them wanted to ensure they would live on after they had served their original purpose by designing in a healthy dose of knowing irony. Imagine this sort of thing:

Cooter Falls Junior School

Little League Softball Team

or

Marv & Nancy’s 4th July Celebrations 2008 (<— in comic sans font)

<clipart picture of fireworks>

or

<Enron logo>

ENRON

or

<three greek letters>

and on the back

<some kind of fratboy/girl in-joke>

Of course the latter wouldn’t qualify as hip in the USA due to the likelihood of people thinking you were actually in said fraternity and therefore a huge tool. But there are plenty of them to choose from.

Now I’m no hipster myself but at 8Bs and 12Bs there were a couple of these I just had to pick up. Unfortunately as luck would have it, they’re both green in colour, meaning that I now have six t-shirts with me and three of them are darkish green. No matter. I have photographed them front (on the left) and back (on the right).

a no-brainer

The Brain Injury Assocation of Pennsylvania one is actually slightly too small for me (but I shall wear it nonetheless, it will encourage me to eat less and remind me not to injure my brain) and I purchased it mainly for Maris’s amusement. Notice how quickly the t-shirt has made its way here, and also the astonishing bad taste (for politically correct America) of the joke on the back.

The second one, I bought because I genuinely think it’s a really cool t-shirt, BUT, I have a feeling it might not be what it claims to be: namely a t-shirt advertising or commemorating some kind of sixties-style freak-out in Tallahassee, FL.

The hipsters have some word for this (I think it may be “vintage” but I’m not sure) to signify that the garment in question, say one of those gas station attendant short-sleeved shirts with a name embroidered on it, was worn by an actual guy called Bob who was an actual gas station attendant, as opposed to having been mass produced and sold in a shop after it became cool to wear such things.

I have no reason to think this other than the fact that the event in question took place in 1988, a long time for a t-shirt to survive, and it seems too good of a find. Anyway, not being a hipster, I could care less (as they say in the USA when they want to imply they couldn’t care less).

Attached are a couple of camera phone pictures I managed to get of some other LOLworthy t-shirts in the market. In case you’re wondering how I could pass up the one on the left, it was only because it was large enough to fit two of me into, having previously belonged to some Dorito-filled United Statesian.

Anyway, if this is the stuff that proved so unsellable it had to be bundled off to Bolivia, I’d love to see the amazing things one must encounter in a normal American thrift store. Maris, since you shop in thrift stores perhaps you could keep an eye out for better examples of the genre and maybe even discreetly photograph a hipster in his or her natural environment for me.

Finally, speaking of t-shirts, last night I saw anothert-shirt on a theme previously mentioned. It translated as something like

What are all these children doing here

and why are they calling me daddy?

If it was in English I’d have hazarded a guess as to its origin but no. The wearer of this t-shirt knew exactly what he was buying. Like Tonio, I’d say he is not as inundated with casual sex (with your mother, or anyone else) as he may like to imply.

[1] Remember that period in the nineties when everyone was briefly really into “Pepe” jeans? That was funny. Where are you now, Pepe Jeans?

[2] Although actually, I didn’t notice any John McCain-related t-shirts so maybe not. Perhaps even the t-shirts from the losing team would be considered of sufficient historical relevance to hang on to. Or perhaps they all ended up in the one container and somewhere else in Bolivia there is a stall that sells nothing but McCain and Obama t-shirts.

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~ by esquilax on 5 October 2009.