I’m no fan of hipsterdom (it says a lot that it takes preppy-ism to make hipsterdom look goood, sort of like it takes feudalism to make laissez-faire capitalism look good). But this David Brooks column railing against hipster parents who dress their kids in hipster outfits is just silly (makes John Tierney look good – almost). To read Brooks, you’d think that the hipsters were the first and only parents to impose their particular culture on their children. Everybody else must just dress their kids in what they’d be wearing in the state of nature, right? What with all the sneering about the counterculture’s dupes, he never quite gets around to specifying what that should be – just that it has something to do with “the dignity of youth.”
I’ll take a baby T-shirt that says “My Mom’s Blog Is Better Than Your Mom’s Blog” over one with a big Nike swoosh any day.
Josh Eidelson 