Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism

The Hipster Economy analyzes the impact of pursuing authenticity on consumption, urban spaces, and late modern capitalism, to offer a fresh perspective on hipsterism and aesthetic consumption.The Hipster Economy gives hipsterism the serious analysis it deserves, through which he reveals the importance of hipster aesthetics, based on authenticity, for today’s consumption-based economy. Since 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. It even transforms urban areas and their local economies. In this book, Alessandro Gerosa analyzes 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.The Hipster Economy provides a historically and sociologically grounded explanation of the value of authenticity in the contemporary economy and society, through which it shows why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers' taste in late modern capitalism. In clear and convincing writing, Gerosa proposes a novel conceptualization of the aesthetic regime of consumption and an analysis of how the hipster economy impacts the urban space.