I found an article that talks about fashion compliance in terms of authorship and hierarchy. Power subversion is once again blamed to bring chaos to the reign of high enlighted fashion priests. Maybe hipsters are trying to say the rest of the world "stop following the man!". The time for hippies re-insurgence is now. (Specially when there is a man to be followed).
"And then, beards were back
Think of how hipsters have suddenly started looking like Paul Bunyan. Think about how the grizzled, bearded look now affected by half of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn this winter was only a short time ago derided as an affectation of gay bears, a small minority of hyper-masculine men who affect potbellies, clodhoppers and lavish chin whiskers.
We are talking full shrubs here, not mangy soul patches, the kind of beards that gay bears once seemed to be the only ones to flaunt.
Is it because atavism runs deep in fashion that the style abruptly leaped across the population boundaries and has now made a startling appearance among the ranks of cool young men, mostly straight?
In the late summer of last year, one spotted a scant few beards around town; then, come autumn, whole blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side were crawling with guys who looked like the musician Devendra Banhart, who in turn seemed to have copped his look from Peter Orlovsky, the poet lover for three decades of Allen Ginsberg, the late literary genius who, after his first visit to India, affected a beard woolier than anything you'd see on a mud-daubed sadhu.
By this past holiday season, whether at clubs and bars like Supreme Trading or Black Betty in Brooklyn, the bearded hipster-mullah-hippie look had proliferated to the point where one could barely distinguish musicians from the local Hasidim."
