Self-confessed dag Samuel Johnson embarks on the first (skinny) leg of his global odyssey to unearth what it means to be a hipster. This episode he travels to Melbourne, London and NYC.
Samuel makes his way through New York and Berlin exploring the hipster trend of the now ubiquitous fixed gear bike, and diet trends which revolve around the words artisanal, locavore and paleo.
Selling everything from bespoke burritos to artisanal soap, businesses operated by and for hipsters are now everywhere - and they're often owned by smart, young "hipsterpreneurs". Sam wants to discover if this term means "savvy exploiter of trends" or "cool kid who got lucky". Suspecting it's a bit of both, Sam travels to Los Angeles where he meets some food truck owners who have used a combination of street smarts, social media skills and culinary innovation to go from fast food to Forbes Magazine in a few short years. Sam returns to Australia for a deeply committed exploration of another fast-growing product and every hipster's tipple of choice: craft beer. Then in Melbourne he sorts himself out with a lot of very strong, very confusing coffee: single origin, fair trade, pourover, cold drip.
Beer labels, cafe menus, pickle jars ... most products targeting hipsters look like they were hand crafted by rural artisans deep in a mountain commune. Keen to understand the reasons behind the prevalence of rustic, oldworld branding in the hipster world, Sam seeks guidance from Roberta Ronsivale of renowned New York branding and design consultancy MUCCA. Observing that a lot of hipsters dress like rural artisans from mountain communes, Sam flies to Melbourne to discover if hipsters genuinely do fear the future or just really love the feel of tweed. Sam then tackles the touchy subject of gentrification in Brooklyn, where Sam meets author and activist Kevin Powell.
Keen to further explore the hipsters' love of things of the past, Sam travels to Tokyo. Sam meets some key players in Tokyo's vintage underground and discovers that in Japan, hipness is not about borrowing the best bits of past subcultures - it's defined by all-out commitment to your chosen style. Sam returns to LA to meet music writer Simon Reynolds, who literally wrote the book on retro. This leads Sam to investigate hipster music. Sam meets LCD Soundsystem's Nancy Whang and young Australian bluesman Steve Smyth and asks them if - musically speaking - there is nothing new under the sun. Then Sam has an epiphany: if hipsters don't like the future, how does the hashtag fit in? Sam heads to London and finds out why many hipsters are now checking in to "digital detox" camps: no smartphones allowed.
Feeling that the Western hipster has become a parody of itself, Sam travels to a place where the word 'hipster' is just beginning to gain traction: China. Sam learns that the idea of the hipster doesn't really exist in China - instead there is a movement known as the 'cultured youth'. This leads Sam to question if 'hipster' as we know it can actually be considered to be a genuine subculture: what has it contributed that we will remember in two decades time? Sam returns to Detroit to meet pop-culture expert and author Bruce Conforth to get his take on what might come after the hipster. Sam goes on to investigate 'normcore' - an 'anti-fashion' trend that is tipped as the next big thing and conveniently for Sam, is pretty much identical to how he dresses.