Today I’m at Angieville talking Regency hipsters and giving away two copies of Gambled Away!
When I looked for recognizable elements of hipsterism in the Regency, I started to spot them here and there. A certain angry “counter-cultural” world-weariness, love of irony, and cynical fascination with excess seems to pop up with regularity in history—from the Restoration rakes, to the French decadent poets who liked to épater la bourgeoisie (shock the middle class) by writing poems about anarchy and sex workers or walking turtles on leashes at the mall (yes this was a thing), to the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and 30s.
Is it a coincidence that those examples all follow on the heels of traumatizing periods of economic depression, social upheaval, or war? Probably not.