How I Became a Hipster

You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn when someone who looks like a 19th-century farmer tells you that his line of work is “affinity marketing.”  I had fallen into conversation with the affinity marketer (beard, plaid flannel shirt, vintage work boots) in the lobby of the Wythe hotel in Williamsburg, a beehive of instrument-bearing musicians, nose-pierced locals and twentysomethings who use the word “ridiculous” in nonpejorative contexts. I guessed aloud, “So, like, if I buy a pair of shoes, then you’ll try to sell me socks?” The affinity marketer smiled and said: “Or maybe something bigger, like flooring. You buy a pair of shoes, I sell you reclaimed hardwood flooring.”

O, bohemia! There are several ways to react to a culture quake. You can meet it with befuddlement, perhaps wondering how flappers handled the thorny intersection between dancing in fountains and limited dry-cleaning.

You can put it on a pedestal by bringing undue optimism to the prospect of meeting Ernest Hemingway or some other expat after his seventh Pernod.

But maybe there’s another way — which is why, in early April, this middle-aged avowed Manhattanite checked into the Wythe and spent a long weekend trying to educate himself, canvassing Kings County’s artisan-loving, kale-devouring epicenter. “Brooklyn” is now a byword for cool from Paris to Sweden to the Middle East. It’s been strange to live across the river from a place that suddenly becomes a cultural reference point — not unlike having your dachshund become an overnight celebrity. Part of you wonders, Why him and not Aunt Barbara?

So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show “Girls” could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond “Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

First I needed to outfit myself. H. W. Carter and Sons in Williamsburg is full of flannel and cardigans and work boots for the younger set. When a scruffy, ponytailed salesman in his 20s approached, I told him: “I’m going for a Mumford & Sons look. I want to look like I play the banjo.”

The sweet-tempered salesman helped me try on several field jackets, including an olive green London Fog, while a second equally sweet and solicitous young salesman (this one in a wool cap) helped me try on selvage denim jeans and a big, lumpy wool cardigan that looked like a lamb had died on me. He also showed me a $225 short-sleeve, plaid, navy jacquard shirt, which I decided to buy. While waiting at the cash register, I picked up a pair of argyle wool socks from a nearby wicker basket and asked, “Are your socks local?” The salesman self-consciously said no. I returned the socks like an organic farmer who has learned that a friend has named her child Monsanto.

Hitting the street and other stores, I fleshed out my purchase with a snug-fitting corduroy vest and a wide-lapel vintage shirt (both $8) from Vice Versa, a thrift shop on Bedford Avenue, and a $10 vintage burgundy blazer (label: Hob Nob, by Irwin) from the Mobile Vintage Shop, a trailer I found parked in Bushwick. When I layered the corduroy shirt over the H. W. Carter shirt, the effect was homespun and slightly raffish: a country-store clerk who has lost his spectacles in the barley.

I walked down Bedford Avenue, a veritable ocean of beard. Realizing that I’ve never been shaved with a straight razor before, I showed up at Barber and Supply, a cavernous salon in a former garage in Williamsburg. I told my barber, Rich, a hirsute Mediterranean-looking man with studs in each ear, that I was anxious about the “Sweeney Todd aspect” of a straight razor. My anxiety was for naught.