Hipster Glasses

About

Hipster Glasses is a photoshop meme that involves placing an exploitable image of thick-framed glasses on a person or animal’s face to caricaturize the subject as a hipster. The glasses are often used as an accessory in image macros with captions poking fun at hipster stereotypes and cliches like “I was into (x) before it got too mainstream,” similar to the way Scumbag Steve’s hat is used to characterize someone or something as immoral.

Origin

Ray-Ban Wayfarers

Wayfarers were originally introduced as sunglasses by the eyewear manufacturer Ray-Ban in 1956. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Wayfarer style sunglasses were worn by the Beatniks, artists and musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jack Nicholson, Andy Warhol and Woody Allen among others. After falling out of style in the 1970’s, they saw a brief resurgence in popularity during the 1980’s after being featuring in the movie The Blues Brothers, followed by a $50,000 product placement deal. According to the Wikipedia^[1] article on the Wayfarers:

Between 1982 and 1987, Ray-Ban sunglasses appeared in over 60 movies and television shows per year; Ray-Ban’s product placement efforts have continued through 2007. Tom Cruise’s wearing of Wayfarers in the 1983 movie Risky Business marked the beginning of a Wayfarers phenomenon; 360,000 pairs were sold that year.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, thick-rimmed glasses became commonly associated with counter-culture fashion codes and nerd elitism, especially with the breakout of Emo^[2] and Hardcore rock subgenres in 2002. Music clothing retail Hot Topic began selling the frames without prescriptive lenses. The glasses saw yet another resurgence in mainstream fashion after being worn by Chloë Sevigny, Mary-Kate Olsen and the vampire Edward Cullen in the 2008 film Twilight. A Facebook^[2] fan page for Wayfarers has 17,438 likes as of August 19th, 2011.

Image Macros

Hipster Kitty (left), created by artist Craig Wheat, was the first Advice Animal series to use thick rimmed glasses, along with a hoodie, to indicate that the cat belonged to the hipster subculture.

Hipster Ariel (right), created by blogger Braden Graeber, was the first Advice Animal series to use Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses as an exploitable accessory.

Spread

Since the emergence of Hipster Ariel in early 2010, Wayfarers became the dominant add-on to portray any subject as a hipster. The usage of Wayfarer glasses became even more widespread with the expansion of Hipster Ariel into other well-known Disney franchises, which was dubbed Hipster Disney Villains by BuzzFeed.

The comic blog Hipster Hitler^[3] was launched on August 22nd, 2010, featuring a daily comic series based on the premise that the Nazi dictator Adolf is a fashion-conscious, music-opinionated hipster. A large collection of derivatives can be found on Memebase^[4], Tumblr^[5] and DeviantArt.^[6]

The catchphrases “you’ve probably never heard of it” and “I was into X before it was mainstream” have become closely associated with the Wayfarer glasses and may be used together in various contexts for image macro captions.