Hats Off For the Metro Hepster: The Irony Fedora, Bowling Shirts, and St. Louis

Think you’ve got problems? Consider the plight of the Metro Hepster: You know him. The Metro Hepster is that species who dawdles in the lower limbs of pop culture’s evolutionary topiary. Slack and sloth-like, he hangs dopily around on a branch a little lower than his couture cousin, the Metrosexual. The Metro Hepster’s a couple of twigs up from another fashion relative, the Urban Hipster, who blessedly has been driven to the point of near-extinction, his numbers dramatically reduced by a near-relentless barrage of high caliber mockery.

It is not, however, a sturdy branch holding up Metro Hipness. Those Van slip-ons, knee-length Madras shorts, and bowling shirts can only carry one so far. (The Metro Hepster adores self-consciously “retro” bowling shirts of the sort favored by drug addict/actor Charlie Sheen. Sheen, in fact, is to the Metro Hepster what Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites is to the endangered Urban Hipster.)  

The Metro Hepster lives with the constant concern he will tumble embarrassingly from his perch. It can happen in an instant. One day, professing to enjoy “the early Simpsons” and disdaining later seasons is sufficient for maintaining Metro-Hepster cred. Next day, he’s caught forgetting it was Kruder and Dorfmeister who did the G-Stoned album and suddenly, the Hipster cohort’s labeled him “mainstream.” Ouch. When your status hangs from nothing more substantial than your soul patch and faux-hawk, much is uncertain. Is your feigned preference for Pickleback shots still deck? Or is it now so midtown it’s fin? You can see where keeping up would be exhausting. Enter the Irony Fedora.

Irony is, in some ways, a natural refuge for the hipster. Constitutionally disinclined to anything like sincerity or a true sense of style, and confusing the sarcastic with the sophisticated, the Metro Hepster gravitates to a (flawed, not surprisingly) sense of irony that is as synthetic as, well, as his stupid hat.

It may be woven of straw rather than of some synthetic material with a snappy brim and snazzy cloth band. The style itself is the bastard spawn of the hat favored by Bear Bryant when it mated with an Orthodox Jew’s fedora. It first appeared on golf courses and in cheesy Vegas casinos back in the fifties. The Irony Fedora is basically an affectation of kitsch, which is as close as the Hepster comes to a sense of anti-fashion. Pretending to like something that’s obviously dated and ugly demonstrates, in the Hepster’s mind, just how hip he is.  And it must be worn at the requisite rakish angle. The Metro Hepster underneath it thinks he looks like he might be strolling into the lobby of the Sands with Sammy, Frankie, and the rest of the Rat Pack, hoping to make time with some of the attendant dames. Only, you know, not really. Because it’s, you know, “ironic.”

When Utah senator Orin Hatch accused President Obama of “turning in his hard hat for a hipster fedora and a double-skim latte,” even the president’s biggest fans winced. The image was too close to home. Of course, the Metro Hepster is immune to the sort of real sarcasm implied by Senator Hatch. The Hepster is generally too preoccupied anyway, on the lookout for indie bands you’ve never heard of, sculpturing smug into an art form, and generally investing an inordinate amount of time trying to look like he isn’t another member of the slavish, conformist herd that he so obviously is.

Of course, what’s really ironic about it all is that, as with his affected preference for music on vinyl, pipe-smoking, and fifties décor coffee shops, the Metro Hwpster’s Irony Fedora demonstrates he doesn’t really understand what irony is. He thinks of it as manufactured quirkiness. He confuses irony with satire. He mistakes a self-conscious sartorial litotes with real irony that, of course, is a sophisticated rhetorical device, one it is safe to say, somewhat beyond the scope of those who imagine wearing an ugly hat demonstrates it. And which is, if you come to think of it, kind of, you know, ironic.