Rise Of...

January Jones dresses her growing son Xander in hipster-style ensemble. This is how hipsters are growing in numbers.

Huffingtonpost.com By Sua Son | November 4, 2013

Today, down-at-heel neighborhoods are transforming into cutting-edge, trendy districts in cities across the world. Some say this urban transformation is due to the influx of "hipsters" with a real passion for food and an eye for design.

Urban cheesemongers and mustachioed greengrocers, with their organic fruit and vegetable smoothies, are making creative waves in Strasbourg Saint-Denis, a neighborhood in the second arrondissement of Paris. This area -- now filled with organic shops, hipster cafes and expensive wine cellars -- was once known as one of the red light districts of the French capital.

Young Parisian entrepreneurs are transforming the neighborhood's vibe by setting up stylish bars and rowdy restaurants that serve seriously good food. However, many Parisians would frown upon the opening of another hipster cafe in the district, worrying that the whole city is now binging on its "coolness." People fear that the city may lose its quirkiness as outlets run by hipsters "out-hip" other shops.

In 2010, Mark Greif of the New York Times published an article "The Hipster in the Mirror," offering interesting insights into the term "hipster." Greif defines a contemporary hipster as someone who follows or settles new trends or styles of the time. In his view, there is not a "fixed" set of characteristics that define a hipster. Cities are becoming places where young people -- hipsters of different origins and social class -- struggle against each other to redefine the notion of "good taste." Taste is a superficial subject. It is known as the ability to judge what is beautiful, proper and good. How we appreciate things such as design, art, music or food is largely dependent on different societal groups. If you are inspired and creative, it seems almost too easy to end up like a hipster today -- yet almost everyone rejects the idea of being one. However, these are the people who are also stakeholders of the city's economy, who put time and effort into building a strong relationship with their neighborhoods. Why can't we see them as inspiring professionals rather than amateurs?

It is true that hipsters are often targeted with mockery. Many complain that these new and very young people are not just inauthentic but also unfit for the neighborhoods they frequent. "The older, the more authentic" -- is this argument plausible in the times we live in? We may assume that the owners of these hipster places are not seeking out enough guidance from locals. However, these people are the ones who actually start businesses, who are willing to transform communities and, more importantly, are more likely to become the long-term residents and investors in their local neighborhoods, raising families and buying from other local businesses.

Instead of asking what cities can do for them, young entrepreneurs are doing things for cities. They are crafting new street scenes, inviting everyone to the once-avoided corners of the Parisian city. In Strasbourg Saint-Denis, shops that used to sell adult products are now selling fresh mozzarella balls and cashew nuts. "Strasbourg Saint-Denis has changed tremendously over the past decade." says Mael Primet, a 29-year-old entrepreneur who has been a resident of Strasbourg Saint-Denis for the last five years.

With or without realizing, almost every city-dweller, including myself, are making hundreds of hipster choices every day: from buying organic fruit and vegetables to having brunch at cafes filled with colorful organic fruit jams and exotic spices. Hipsters continue to reinvent themselves and their neighborhoods for the better. These are the people who are remaking and reviving the streets of Strasbourg Saint-Denis, and other formerly down-at-heel neighborhoods of Paris and other big cities. It is not to suggest that every hipster is contributing something good to the society, but there are many who are creating business opportunities in their cities, and providing better city experiences for the people who live in them.

NYTimes.com By THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS | November 8, 2013

The northern edge of Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement, near the Place Pigalle, was once known as “la Nouvelle-Athènes,” both for the neo-Classical flourishes of its most graceful blocks and for the creative geniuses who swept in to inhabit them.

This was the original “gay Paree” on display in Edouard Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” a Bohemia of near-mythical proportions in which every tier of society — from the well heeled to the creative to the horizontally employed — collided in the district’s cafes, theaters and cabarets. It was the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor. The area around Pigalle in particular — which American G.I.’s aptly called “Pig Alley” — was always a mixture of both, its seediness informing the artistic production and spirit of numerous generations of inhabitants. You can see it in Edgar Degas’s brush strokes and hear it in Edith Piaf’s voice.

But it’s disappearing. Today, the neighborhood has been rechristened “South Pigalle” or, in a disheartening aping of New York, SoPi. Organic grocers, tasteful bistros and an influx of upscale American cocktail bars are quietly displacing the pharmacies, dry cleaners and scores of seedy bar à hôtesses that for decades have defined the neighborhood.

These “hostess bars,” marked by barely dressed women perched in the windows, are the direct descendants of the regulated brothels that thrived here from Napoleon’s time until the postwar purge of the 1940s. The French daily Libération reports that in 2005 there were 84 such establishments around Pigalle. Today there are fewer than 20. Their disappearance is a watermark of the quarter’s rapid loss of grit and character alike.

When my wife and I first moved here in 2011, I wasn’t sure what to make of living in the middle of a functioning red-light district. Our neighborhood, though safe and well on its way to gentrification, remained funky in the original sense of the term. In addition to cigarette smoke and baking bread, there was the whiff of dirt and sex in the air. It took a while for me to get used to the tap-tapping on windows — or hissing and tongue clicking from open doors — that greeted me as I passed the bars on my way to fill a prescription or buy a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé.

I have never quite gotten used to the transsexual hookers who traipse the Boulevard de Clichy outside the area’s various sex shops and with whom I must share the carnivalesque sidewalk on my way in and out of the post office. Frankly, they make me uncomfortable.

But I’ve come to see that unease as a good thing the longer I stay in this corner of France, a country where the world’s oldest profession continues to enjoy a special patrimonial status and where, try as it might, the government can’t seem to un-sew that tawdry patch from the national quilt. (It is now considering criminalizing johns, which prompted incensed writers and luminaries to pen a spirited manifesto in protest.)

We should be grateful to be jolted from our anesthetized routines, confronted when we can be with surroundings and neighbors that are not injection-molded to the contours of our own bobo predilections. Too much of modern urban life revolves around never feeling less than fully at ease; about having even the minutest of experiences tailored to a set of increasingly demanding and homogeneous tastes — from the properly sourced coffee grounds that make the morning’s flat white to the laboriously considered iPod soundtracks we rely on to cancel the world’s noise. The logical extension is to “curate” our urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility.

Outside my window, and adjacent to a baby boutique that stocks cashmere swaddle blankets, is a nondescript Asian massage parlor. On nice summer days, there is one masseuse who likes to prop open the door, pull her chiropractic table into the fresh air and sunbathe between clients. Once I watched a well-turned-out mother with toddler approach as the woman was smoking a cigarette. Instead of giving the kind of not-in-my-backyard glare I imagined her Park Slope counterpart might unleash, she just asked the masseuse for a light. They shared a few friendly words before going their separate ways, leaving me to wonder why I thought that should be odd.

SUCH encounters are getting rarer by the week, but they remind me that genuinely engaging with an urban space means encountering and making room for an assortment of lifestyles and social realities — some appealing, some provocative, and some repulsive. This is what the Situationists meant by psychogeography, or, as Guy Debord put it, the “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

Down the street, where Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec once had his studio, you now must pass a store called “Pigalle” — a high-end streetwear purveyor — and then Buvette Gastrotèque, the handsome new Paris outpost of a faux-French restaurant and bar from the West Village.

From there a left turn puts you at the intersection of Rue Victor Massé and Rue Frochot, where, in the space of one half-block, three hostess bars have recently been shuttered and reopened as upscale cocktail lounges. That number includes the famous Dirty Dick, now a Polynesian-themed luxury rum bar, with the name and grungy facade kept ironically intact. Inside, the atmosphere is far more beach bum than bordello; the most subversive element is a smoking room in the back.

Directly opposite, beside a dilapidated DVD shop, black-clad bouncers assemble a velvet rope each night in front of a pristine new bar called Glass. It is the brainchild of a polyglot team of N.Y.U. grads who have decided (correctly, judging by their success) that what Parisians want most these days are tacos, hot dogs and homemade tonic water in their G & Ts. Le F’Exhib — the lone holdout on the block, where the girls and the ravaged exterior seemed to age in tandem — finally closed its doors this fall.

And so a vivid and storied layer of authentic Paris is being wiped out not by not-in-my-backyard activism, government edict or the rapaciousness of Starbucks or McDonald’s but by the banal globalization of hipster good taste, the same pleasant and invisible force that puts kale frittata, steel-cut oats and burrata salad on brunch tables from Stockholm to San Francisco.

Drifting through these streets, as they are scrubbed clean and homogenized before my eyes, my thoughts turn to Blaise Pascal, who once wrote “a man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.” The same, of course, could be said of neighborhoods. The nicer this one gets, the more it seems to feel like the one I left behind in Brooklyn.

People say you had to be in Paris in the ’20s or New York in the ’80s. The sad truth of our contemporary moment seems to be only that you no longer need to be anywhere in particular anymore.

The brunch is all the same.