Same
old, same old. How the hipster aesthetic is taking over the world
Kyle Chayka
Sunday 7 August 2016
00.05 BST
Industrial
furniture, stripped floors and Edison bulbs: why must we aspire to
such bland monotony?
Go to Shoreditch
Grind, near a roundabout in the middle of London’s hipster
district. It’s a coffee shop with rough-hewn wooden tables,
plentiful sunlight from wide windows, and austere pendant lighting.
Then head to Takk in Manchester. It’s a coffee shop with a big
glass storefront, reclaimed wood furniture, and hanging Edison bulbs.
Compare the two: You might not even know you’re in different
spaces.
It’s no accident
that these places look similar. Though they’re not part of a chain
and don’t have their interior design directed by a single corporate
overlord, these coffee shops have a way of mimicking the same tired
style, a hipster reduction obsessed with a superficial sense of
history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied
the neighbourhoods they take over. And it’s not just London and
Manchester – this style is spreading across the world, from Bangkok
to Beijing, Seoul to San Francisco.
It’s not just
coffee shops, either. Everywhere you go, seemingly hip, unique spaces
have a way of looking the same, whether it’s bars or restaurants,
fashion boutiques or shared office spaces. A coffee roaster resembles
a WeWork office space. How can all that homogeneity possibly be cool?
In an essay for the
American tech website The Verge, I called this style “AirSpace”.
It’s marked by an easily recognisable mix of symbols – like
reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting –
that’s meant to provide familiar, comforting surroundings for a
wealthy, mobile elite, who want to feel like they’re visiting
somewhere “authentic” while they travel, but who actually just
crave more of the same: more rustic interiors and sans-serif logos
and splashes of cliche accent colours on rugs and walls.
Hence the
replicability: if a hip creative travels to Berlin or Tallinn, they
seek out a place that looks like AirSpace, perhaps recommending it on
Foursquare or posting a photo of it to Instagram to gain the approval
of culturally savvy friends. Gradually, an entire AirSpace geography
grows, in which you can travel all the way around the world and never
leave it.
You can hop from
cookie-cutter bar to office space to apartment building, and be
surrounded by those same AirSpace tropes I described above. You’ll
be guaranteed fast internet, strong coffee, and a comfortable chair
from which to do your telecommuting. What you won’t get is anything
interesting or actually unique.
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There are several
causes of AirSpace. The first is that mobility is increasing: more
people move more quickly around the world than ever before, mostly
passing through the same urban hotspots (London, New York, Los
Angeles, Hong Kong), and carrying their sense of style with them.
It’s globalisation, but intensified, made more accessible to a
wider economic spectrum of people, more of the time. Mobility is not
just for the rich anymore: working remotely is increasingly common;
you can take a sabbatical to work from Bali and not miss a beat.
Taste is also
becoming globalised, as more people around the world share their
aesthetic aspirations on the same massive social media platforms,
whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Foursquare, with
their hundreds of millions or billions of users. As algorithms shape
which content we consume on our feeds, we all learn to desire the
same things, which often happens to involve austere interiors,
reclaimed wood, and Edison bulbs, like a metastasised real-life
version of Kinfolk magazine or Monocle.
Startups are also
growing to provide these experiences of sameness as a product,
predicated on the fact that we now prefer consuming ready-made
generic spaces to creating new ones of our own. We’ve been
infantilised. The companies use technology to foster a sense of easy
placelessness; Roam, for example, is an international chain of
co-living and working spaces that offers the same lifestyle (and same
furniture) in Madrid, Miami, and Ubud, and residents can live
anywhere for £1,500 per month. WeWork’s WeLive branch creates wan
dormitories for mobile tech workers, each with its own raw-wood
furniture and mandated techno-kitsch interior decorating.
But the king of
AirSpace is Airbnb. The platform enables users to travel seamlessly
between places, staying in locals’ apartments. Its slogan is “you
can belong anywhere”. But all Airbnbs have a way of looking like
AirSpace, too – consultants who work with Airbnb hosts as well as
the company’s own architects told me that a certain sameness is
spreading, as users come to demand convenience and frictionlessness
in lieu of meaningful engagement with a different place. Heading to
yet another copycat coffee shop with your laptop isn’t “local”.
Why go anywhere if it just ends up looking the same as whatever
global city you started from?
It’s not just
boring aesthetics, however. AirSpace creates a division between those
who belong in the slick, interchangeable places and those who don’t.
The platforms that enable this geography are themselves biased: a
Harvard Business School study showed that Airbnb hosts are less
likely to accept guests with stereotypically African-American names.
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There’s also the
economic divide: access to AirSpace is expensive, whether it’s a £3
cortado or the rent on a WeLive or Roam apartment. If you can’t
afford it, you are shut out.
AirSpace is
convenient, yes. It helps its occupants feel comfortable wherever
they are, settled in amid recognisable reminders that they are
relevant, interesting, mobile, and global. You can change places
within it with a single click, the same anonymous seamlessness of an
airport lounge but distributed everywhere, behind the facades of
local buildings that don’t look like hotels, but act like them.
Yet the discontent
of this phenomenon is a creeping anxiety. Is everywhere really
starting to look just the same? Glance around and you might be
surprised.
The next time you
pick out a cafe or bar based on Yelp recommendations or Foursquare
tips, or check into an Airbnb, each system driven by an audience of
similar people, check if you see reclaimed wood furniture, industrial
lighting, or a certain faux-Scandinavian minimalism. Welcome to
AirSpace. It will be very hard to leave.
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