Core77

This in from the New York Times Fashion section on June 24: hipsters all dress the same.

Melena Ryzik visits the multi-city Renegade Craft Fair in its latest installment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and writes this review, noticing a few things that have been noticed before, especially by fans of the Hipster Craft Revival movement (capitalization added). Namely, that the current incarnation of the DIY aesthetic experiences pervasive trends, and that hand-made production doesn't scale very well.

The pervasive trends are probably pretty familiar to Etsy.com shoppers or readers of Design Sponge: sparrows, owls, and forest animals as recurring motifs; labor intensive handicrafts like knitting, ceramics and sewing machine embroidery; a rough, intentionally unfinished quality that says Punk Rock, superimposed on a girly palette of floral print, stained glass and moss-colored felt. Closer attention reveals that songbirds are so 2005, and the smart money is on cephalapod imagery for the coming season.

If this all sounds a little like the discussion of Blue vs. Cerulean in The Devil Wears Prada, that's no accident.

Fashion is fashion after all, whether it's designed in Paris and produced in Bangladesh, or comes entirely from the mind and hands of a tattooed 30-something part-time barista in Portland. Trends are created, dispersed, modified, embraced and rebelled against at a regular pace in both worlds. While the high fashion world has chosen to celebrate this play of images and fads, though, the "Renegade" ethic of the Craft Revival would kind of like to pretend it doesn't exist. Craft is all about individuality and self-expression, after all, and the last thing you want when you're shopping for it is a handmade one-of-a-kind wrist cuff that looks the same as someone else's.

This puts individual Crafters in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, the traits they can offer that no Wal-Mart knockoff can match are authenticity and originality. On the other hand, to be successful, a lot of people have to buy your stuff, and people are susceptible to trends. The hipster contingent that supports the Renegade Craft Fair and similar markets is a media-savvy one; they read blogs, follow (well-dressed) bands, talk with their friends in Oakland and Austin and Wicker Park about what's cool. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a lot of them like the same things, or even dress the same. For every browser who's drawn in by a completely original creation, there might be a dozen who saw something on a friend's wrist or coffee table, and want something mostly like that.

None of this invalidates the authenticity of the Craft Revival, of course. It's not as if our great-grandmothers spent their time chastising each other for making similar quilts; indeed, the present-day level of obsession with individual expression is unprecedented in the history of home decorating or dress. But while the value placed on differentiation has risen, the forces that encourage its opposite haven't gone away.

Perhaps we ought to give the kids trying to make a living on sparrow-themed throw pillows a bit of a break. After all, they're putting their labor where their ideals are -- whether a handmade piece is derivative or not, it's still handmade. And in any case, between trying to pay the rent and trying to fill an order for 600 of those things with only two hands and a sewing machine, they've got troubles either way.