thats a loaded question but this is a pretty good stab at it:

Mark Greif, a founder of n+1 and an assistant professor at The New School, in a New York Times editorial, states that "hipster" is often used by youth from disparate economic backgrounds to jockey for social position. He questions the contradictory nature of the label, and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: "Paradoxically, those who used the insult were themselves often said to resemble hipsters — they wore the skinny jeans and big eyeglasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashions and 'tourists.' " He believes the much-cited difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety, since it "calls everyone’s bluff." Like Arsel and Thompson, he draws from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu to conclude:


You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as "liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands"; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the "creative professions." These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural "cool."


They, in turn, may malign the "trust fund hipsters." This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into "cultural capital" (Bourdieu's most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in her trucker hat.) Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be "superior": hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.[19]

Greif's efforts puts the term "hipster" into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status. The cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility


[en.wikipedia.org])