A man upset by an idea expressed in an article that “all hipsters look alike” proves the point by mistaking a photo of a hipster as himself.
It’s been a long-running joke that all male hipsters look alike in their manner of dress and beards. Recently, life imitated art, and in the process, proved the point that all hipsters do pretty much look alike.
Brandeis University published a recent study on the “hipster effect.” The main points of the article were that nonconformists often unintentionally end up becoming conformists by adopting a certain look and style, which ultimately ends up with everyone looking alike.
This can be traced back to the hippie movement of the late 1960s, the punk rock movement of the mid-1970s, the Goths of the 80s, and even the grunge rock era of the early 1990s, and more. Some of these movements have centered around music, but not always.
The article used a photo obtained from the stock photo house Getty Images to exemplify the look of your average hipster.
A man saw the photo, and wrote to the publication threatening legal action. In his email, the man wrote:
“You used a heavily edited Getty Image of me for your recent bit of click-bait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article and somewhat ironically about five years too late to be as desperately relevant as it is attempting to be.
By using a tired cultural trope to try to spruce up an otherwise disturbing study. Your lack of basic journalistic ethics and both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response and I am of course pursuing legal action.”
After receiving the man’s angry email, the team that published the article did a double check on the stock photo copyright and photo release to do due diligence and make sure they weren’t in violation.
Upon contacting Getty Images, they found that the person who had signed the model release was not the same person who had written the email.
After the team had found at the angry man was not the one pictured in the photo, they wrote him back with the proof.
The man’s response was:
“Wow, I stand corrected I guess. I and multiple family members, and a childhood friend pointed it out to me, thought it was a mildly photo-shopped picture of me. I even have a very similar hat and shirt, though in full color I can see it’s not the same. Thank you for getting back to me and resolving the issue.”
Thus, in the end, the article proved its point, and the team’s leader tweeted that the incident “proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.”
