Hipster Pissed Over His Photo in Article on Hipsters Looking the Same… But It’s a Different Hipster

The MIT Technology Review recently published a story titled, “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same.” The photo accompanying the article pissed off a hipster, and hilarity ensued.

The article was a summary of a research paper that found that in trying to make a “counter-cultural statement,” hipsters often end up looking like each other. And at the top of the article was a photo illustration of a hipster with copies of him:

The Register reports that the magazine soon received an angry email from a man who wasn’t happy when he saw himself being used as the lead illustration for the article. He accused the Technology Review of “slandering him.”

Here’s the story told in a series of Tweets by MIT Technology Review editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield:


Lichfield then looked into whether the magazine had the proper model releases to use the man’s likeness.


It turns out the photo illustration was based on a Getty Images stock photo titled, “Styled for the street: Shot of a handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background.”

Embed from Getty Images

The photo had a restriction stating that any use in an unflattering way must be accompanied by a note stating that the subject is a model.



And here’s where things get hilarious: the furious hipster who emailed wasn’t even the hipster in the photo.


“He’d misidentified himself,” Lichfield writes. “All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.”

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