And now, a followup on our post from last weekend, in which we pointed out a post from the Austin, TX branch of culturemap.com, polling readers to see which American city would take over from Austin as the next hipster mecca. At the time that we posted about it, Richmond had two-thirds of the vote, with Chattanooga, TN, our nearest competitor, hovering around 15%. Polling closed yesterday, and in the interim, it became even less of a contest, with RVA's final tally reaching 72% of all votes cast. Does this mean that Austinites really think of Richmond as their city's heir apparent? Does it mean that some sort of wildly successful pro-hipster-status viral marketing ploy took place on RVA-related internet back channels throughout the weekend? Or is some other, more sinister reality indicated by this result?
If anything, we think that what it proves is that you can't put too much stock in online polls. Some of our readers, who were quite vocal in the comments to our facebook post about our original article, really don't like even contemplating the idea of hipsters, let alone considering whether or not they have now or soon will invade RVA. Others seemed to consider this a positive designation for RVA, with the tag of "hipster city" indicating that we have a thriving young artistic and musical community. Austin Culturemap's Lauren Modrey, who wrote the post that started it all, followed up with an article covering the various reactions from cities she'd included in the poll. In that article, she warns that we can expect an influx of:
"Shepard Fairey street art, Californians, food trailers, 2 more additional American Apparels, pedicabs, more music festivals than you'll know what to do with, random Ryan Gosling sightings, a W Hotel and gluten-free, dairy-free air sandwiches."
In addition to mentioning that her editors should have caught the redundancy of the phrase "more additional," I'd also like to comment that I don't think there'd be anything wrong with more food trailers and music festivals showing up here in RVA. Shepard Fairey, Californians, and "gluten-free, dairy-free air sandwiches" don't sound nearly as appealing to me, but you take the bad with the good, I suppose.