10 Ways To Tell That You're In A Hipster Bar

Everyone has a hipster bar experience they've enjoyed/endured. By now, hipster bars aren't tough to spot; from the moment you walked past the bikes chained out front, past the carefully drawn chalkboard advertising PBR pounders for $3, and into the hipper-than-thou interior, you knew what you were in for.

Because everyone knows the obvious tell-tale signs, we've decided to linger on some of the more subtle but no less insidious characteristics of the hipster bar. Here are 10 ways to tell.

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With this many anchor tattoos, you’d expect far more sailors. Maybe the bar tender was a sailor years ago, but now he has to get this drunk before his shift just to deal with these whiny trustafarians. "This drunk" basically means he’ll be vomiting and blind after this next shot. Which is coming right up.

None of these people with anchor tattoos are sailors. None of them.

There’s more than enough ‘90s nostalgia to go around in hipsterdom. Have you or any of your friends done the following at the bar? If you have, you were drinking in a hipster bar.

Wear your Ren & Stimpy t-shirt. Mention Snick. Recite lines from Salute Your Shorts. Relate the unknowability of Pete & Pete's Mr. Tastee to Sartre. And that’s just the Nickelodeon vault.

Nostalgia for the childhood of the hipster has spawned a whole genre of music (see chillwave); it’s sure to make a dent in your bargoing experience.

A test: drop your eyes to waist level and survey the butts in the room. Can you determine gender based on backsides alone? No? Go up a few inches. Armpit hair emerging from a tank top? That doesn’t mean shit. Buzz cut for hair? You still know nothing.

Androgyny means possessing characteristics of both genders; epicene means having the characteristics of neither. Think about it.

Though everyone will be smoking in shifts, either outside the bar, near the bikes, or on the back patio, if you think you’ll be able to bum a square, you’re wrong. Bumming a smoke should be an easy process. You put on an apologetic face, swallow that little sip of pride, and ask for a smoke. This is how it should work.

At a hipster bar, expect to wait while the dude with the fidgety mustache moistens his lips and rolls you a smoke. The grease from under his fingernails will move to the rolling papers and you’ll listen to him and his friends talk about Lars Von Trier, Catholicism, and Muppets. How are these things connected? Why does his tobacco look like that? Does he have to use that much saliva? Why didn’t you just run to the bodega? There will be time enough to answer all of these things while you wait for your cigarette to be prepared. If you can get one of these fey creatures to expend the time and energy, that is.

Everyone is lonely; everyone wants to be noticed.

So the kid pretending to write in his Moleskine has brought the collected works of Hemingway in a rucksack that he occasionally unpacks and then repacks in plain sight, just at the bar's end. That girl is dressed literally like a character from Heathers. Literally she bought the outfit in an outlandishly priced eBay auction and if no one notices she’s going to make like Plath and take this to the oven. (Not really, of course; there’s always the chance that someone will post something on Missed Connections the next morning and then all the work will have paid off. And if they haven’t posted that morning, there’s always the next. And the next. And the next. And the next, just like the boy packing and unpacking his moveable literary feast.)

The difference between a hipster bar and a dive bar is the backstory of the old clutter filling the space. The Christmas lights strung year-round in your favorite dive bar came from somebody’s uncle’s attic. The story begins and ends there. The Christmas lights in your favorite hipster bar were harvested from a foreclosed home that housed an outsider artist who you haven’t heard of but recently inspired an upcoming album that will be very well reviewed. The stringed lights were appraised at having significant value by reliable sources, but the mustachioed owners of the bar handcrafted better, greener bulbs to use instead of the originals. This halved the value of the lights, but they now use a quarter less energy. You can read all about it on the cute plaque next to the bathroom door.

The bathroom door is made from wood from a tree felled during a storm in the late 19th century; there’s a plaque detailing this, too. And have you read the plaque for the chair you’re sitting on? You’ll have to stand to read it; it’s underneath your ass.

If it’s not a deep cut from Odessey & Oracle, then it’s probably the latest Katy Perry track coming from the jukebox, which contains actual compact discs. But no one will be dancing, or even having much fun. They’ll be complaining that their preferred way of hearing “Firework” is through the bottomed-out speakers in the bodega. Something missing in Perry’s vocals is revealed through the compromised audio devices when you half-listen while contemplating which brand of lemonade will mix best with your smugly enjoyed Colt 45. We’ll spend the next 15 minutes explaining how you should listen to Katy Perry if you have the time.

Hipsterdom places a premium on skinny. Your jeans should be fitting tight because they’re tinier than your already tiny frame. If you’re in a hipster bar, all the fat people you see are lost.

Somehow it’s become in vogue for all the women at this bar to dress like they’re 4-year-olds preparing for bed. Onesies abound (rompers are onsies, sorry). If this garment has more than one part, so help these girls, god, because they will not wear them. Being called "daddy" by a girl with a lopsided haircut and a baggy romper that renders her formless, the swimming suggestion of a sexless person—that’s your favorite thing, right?

Now that you’ve reached the end, everything has changed. Hipster culture is essentially contrarian, which means that the opposite of all of these things could be hipster as well.

But probably the PBR will remain unchanged. Even hipsters have limits.