Name: Brooklyn.
Age: Nearly 400 years old.
Appearance: Ubiquitous.
My goodness, they grow up so fast, don’t they? It seems like only 18 years ago that the tabloids were going nuts over the madness of naming your child after the place he was conceived. What are you talking about?
Brooklyn Beckham, beloved firstborn of David and Victoria, March 4 1999. What are you talking about? Just … Brooklyn. The word.
Why? There are now almost 100 companies in the UK with “Brooklyn” in the title.
Are they all owned by Brooklyn Beckham? They are not.
What’s going on then? Is it one of those memes I keep hearing about? No. Although I suppose, possibly, sort of.
Explain thyself. Brooklyn is the hipster capital of the world –
Because it’s where all the creative types went they were finally priced out of Manhattan a decade ago? Yes – and so is now achingly cool. UK companies are trying to import a little bit of that for themselves through the cunning medium of monikers.
But that surely is a) not at all effective, b) an oddly lazy form of thinking with which to present your company to the world and c) directly counter to the ethos of raw authenticity and originality in which hipsterism is so thoroughly grounded? To be honest, it’s not been so thoroughly grounded as all that for quite a while, really.
How so? What began as a creative making of necessity, in the days when all new Brooklynites could afford was metal shelving, mismatched furniture and a lot of exposed brickwork because landlords won’t plaster anything without a rocket up them, has turned into an aesthetic virtue and gone mainstream, as a look in any coffee shop will show you.
I always go to Debenhams. Apart from Debenhams. Though its distressed timbering, chalkboard-menuing, handreared-chargrilled-lightly-massaged-artichoke-heart-offering may yet come.
So that’s what we’ve got to look forward to in 2017 – the hipsters taking over the world? Look on the bright side. Trump will probably insist on recruiting them for the frontline in his war with China.
But then we’ll lose. We are always going to lose. The important thing is to get rid of the people who drink deconstructed coffee first.
Do say: “More freshly oven-balched beetcorn labneys, anyone?”
Don’t say: “That’s from the Ladybird book How to Be a Hipster, you inauthentic monster.”
