Yay, Cintra’s back again this week! (via Critical Shopper - Opening Ceremony Reinvents the Fashion Wheel - NYTimes.com)

What does it all mean when your friend the snarky fashion writer —writing in the newspaper of record —calls your favorite store (where you save up to buy a few pieces a season, where a bunch of your friends work, where you did some contract work last year in exchange for store credit) “too-hip-for-hipness”?

First impulse is to think: perhaps I just shouldn’t worry about the “death of the hipster” or the “decline of subcultures” then. I realized recently that those conversations are kind of irrelevant to my ongoing pursuits. I like what I like; I hate reductive labels. It’s distracting.

Yet, obviously, because these discussions get a lot of play around here, and because I am a thoughtful person, I can’t help but get mired in them occasionally — even if I don’t comment directly.

So, jumping in late to a conversation that I missed out on the other day: I am a person who love(d)s electroclash, completely unironically, but who also got into a bitchy (funny) verbal smackdown with Paul Sevigny once (I think he won, but only due to his own self-concious alpha-hipster pose). I’m not even sure I’m capable of doing anything ironically. Which, I think, is probably the root of my problems with 99% of what “indie” culture has become, come to think of it. Especially the humor. It’s all kind of lost on me.

(Yes, really.)