It’s time to shave that beard: the decade of the hipster is over

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[/audioplayer]Calling all hipsters, it’s time to get the razor out! You have hit peak beard. You’ve had a decade of getting away with those narrow, short trousers and the studiously thought-out socks; with the Victorian archdeacon beards and the shaven sides to your heads.

It wasn’t even that good while it lasted. Like gay fashionistas — but without any humour or bite — the hipsters stood in front of the wardrobe for an age every morning. And then proceeded to pick out random combinations of clothes straight from the £1 reject basket in a rural Norfolk branch of Help the Aged: Barbours, cable-knit cardies and jumpers from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, twinned with Clark Kent specs. As Reuben Dangoor put it in his inspired YouTube attack, ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’, hipsters dress like nerds without getting the grades.

All fashion depends for its survival on a group of misguided lemmings who live for conformity dressed up as anti-conformity. And the fashion lemmings have always been with us: from the Earl of Essex’s moody fan club in the 1590s in their studious, melancholy black outfits to Beau Brummell’s regency cult — all dark coats, full-length trousers, crisp shirts and cravats that took an hour to tie in the morning. The difference is that Essex and Beau Brummell not only looked good; they were also original.

When hipsters grow a twirly-whirly moustache or sport a farmhand’s collarless shirt, last worn by John Clare in Cambridgeshire in 1832, they think they look good, clever and amusing. They end up being completely derivative, plundering a ragbag of tired and worn influences: fin de siècle facial hair lifted from Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book; waistcoats that channel the Young Fogeys and the retro-gent magazine The Chap; and those silly short trousers, courtesy of the American fashion designer Thom Browne, who’s been flogging them for nearly a decade alongside carefully cropped jackets.