Alessandro Gerosa

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. The Hipster Economy analyses this complex set of related phenomena to argue that the quest for authenticity has been a driver of Western societies from the emersion of capitalism and industrial society to today. From this premise, the book advances multiple original contributions. First, it explains why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers’ taste in late modern capitalism; second, it proposes a novel conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of consumption; third, the book constitutes the first detailed analysis of the resurgence of the neo-craft industries, their entrepreneurs, and the economic imaginary of consumption underpinning them, and fourth, it analyses how the hipster economy is impacting the urban space, favouring new logic of urban development with contrasting outcomes.

Existing research has highlighted a global return into fashion of craft work in the new century. Within this context, the term ‘neo-craft’ work has been used to identify innovative craft work practices characterized by an aura of ‘coolness’, which promise a less alienated form of work; yet, the specific contours of this new form of work remain uncertain. In this article we develop a theoretical conceptualization of neo-craft work. We define it as an emergent form of post-industrial craft work whereby work that was previously considered low-status, or performed by the working class, is: (a) ‘resignified’ into status-producing activity through the integration of craft practices and values; and (b) conferred new meaningfulness as the outcome of a specific process of discursive materiality, by which the intra-action of discursive and material practices provides meaning to work activity. Neo-craft work, we contend, finds roots in the cultural milieu of hipster culture, where extenuating cultural negotiations around authenticity and ‘the particular’ constitute the baseline for a quest for social status based on practices of ‘marginal distinction’, and sets itself as an alternative not only to industrial work but, primarily, to the precarious, low-paid or otherwise unsatisfactory ‘bullshit jobs’ of the knowledge and creative economy.

This article delineates a critical history of the economic imaginary of the creative economy. Applying the Cultural Political Economy analytical framework, the article looks at the turning points during the twentieth and twenty-first century in which different but connected discourses over creativity in the economic sphere emerged. Multiple contributions derive from the results. First, the research adds analytical depth to the existing literature, recovering the thought of Patten and the economic and political debate about creativity during the fifties and the sixties. This operation allows the integration of these discourses and more recent ones about the creative city, creative industries, and creative class under a common framework. Overall, a clear pattern emerges, consisting of two phases: a first phase of germination, in which academic and intellectual circles conceptualise the discourses, and a second phase of dissemination, in which political figures appropriate and spread those discourses. Lastly, we argue that the discourses composing the creative economy imaginary, taken together, can be interpreted as the attempt of Western economies to trigger a new successful cycle of economic accumulation, able to replace the Fordist one.

Cultural omnivorousness has gained relevance as a suitable theory to explain contemporary patterns of consumption, but the actual dealing of omnivorous taste by economic actors and businesses has been mostly overlooked. Through ethnographic research, this article explores how Italian gourmet food truck operators concretely produce claims of authenticity for omnivorous seekers. First, the adoption of the perspective of food truck operators highlights the reflexive and market-bounded nature of the omnivorous taste reproduction. Moreover, “being authentic” becomes an imperative for tastemakers, imposed by the economic imaginary. Finally, the centrality of regionalism in the Italian production of authenticity suggests that localism, too, has been subsumed by global food imaginaries and that regionalism expresses a cosmopolitan attitude. Taken together, these findings allow the integration of existing theory of food cultural omnivorousness: “gourmet” food must be authentic to be recognised by omnivores and distinctive to be successful on markets.

This article analyzes the entanglement of social impacts of bottom-up urban branding processes on local hyperdiverse communities, through an ethnography of a neighborhood of Milan recently named by a group of residents as “NoLo.” Indeed, existing literature has broadly investigated urban rebranding as a tool used by policy makers to foster social change and economic capital, imposing top-down transformations. Nevertheless, a gap in the bottom-up place rebranding processes exists. We inspect it through the aforementioned case study and by combining place branding literature, the loss of place identity and theories on empowerment. Empirically, we analyze the socioeconomic processes and the actors that enabled the rebranding, discussing the positive externalities and the criticalities in terms of marginalization of weaker social groups and cultural hegemony. As for the theory, we contribute to the literature arguing that a bottom-up process is not enough to avoid a loss of place identity, as it can lead to selective empowerment.