Matt’ and Dispatches are on vacay this week, so please enjoy another post from TNG reader Randi.

At the school where I did my undergraduate degree, I wore my secondhand plaid button downs, old tight fitting jeans (from when I was 10 pounds lighter in high school), and my worn Chuck Ts almost everyday.  In those four years, I never once got called a hipster.  My school’s rural campus, although only 90 minutes away from the DC suburb where I grew up, seemed untouched by the outside world.  People were too busy playing Frisbee golf, listening to jam bands, and walking around barefoot to care about the latest news on Pitchfork Media, let alone even know what that was.  When I graduated in 2007, I moved back home and worked as a business casual drone for a year before jumping back into the academic world—and unknowingly into “trendy” fashion.

After having just survived my first year of graduate school at American University, I am now horribly taken aback when someone refers to me as a hipster, whether it is meant as an epithet or not.  I can recall the very first time it happened, and I got so flustered all I could respond with was an exasperated “I-am-not-a-hiptster!”  After class that night I drove home up Connecticut Avenue with my classmate’s hipster comment echoing in my head.  I knew he didn’t mean anything malicious—he even self-identified as a hipster later in the semester during a conversation—but there was still something that didn’t sit well with me.  Yes, we all know that stereotypes and all sorts of labels are essentializing, but my discomfort with the hipster identity was something that I couldn’t pinpoint until I was cleaning out my closet last weekend.

Behind my old competitive swimmer’s bag and next to my Doc Martens, I found the answer to my hipster discomfort in the form of my late 90s Teva sandals.  At my hippie college, if you weren’t walking around barefoot, you were most likely wearing a pair of sandals.  In my four years I’ve noticed that there is a sandal hierarchy.  At the very top of this footwear pyramid are Chacos and Birkenstocks for the hippie hippies and Rainbows and Sperry Top-Siders for the preppy hippies.  Other popular brands included Reef, Keens, and the crappy flip flops they sold at the campus store.  In college, while all my friends were either barefoot or in sandals, I was wearing shoes.  I swam in college and was wet, cold, and barefoot all the time.  In my experience there are two types of swimmers: 1) swimmers who don’t give a fuck about what they step in while barefoot, and 2) swimmers who would rather curl up and die than walk barefoot in a locker room.  I am the latter, but on land and away from water, I am all about shoes.

Flash forward to May 2009, where the only sandals I saw in my entire year at AU were in the style of the ones people wore in antiquity.  I’m starting to think that the only way to shred my newly assigned hipster image is to do something I consciously avoided all throughout undergrad.  Flash forward to last weekend when I unearthed my Tevas.  I tentatively ripped back the Velcro straps and pulled them onto my feet.  They still fit on account that I haven’t grown any since I was 13.  I immediately ran downstairs to show my mom and my sister (who has UGGS and stilettos in her closet) my long lost treasure.  My sister scrunched her nose and asked if I was wearing those out.  The entire time I was at hippie school, all I wanted to do was wear shoes.  Now that I am feeling the pressure of the mores of the city’s fashion demands, I feel suffocated by labels that people have associated with my particular style of dress.  In that moment in the kitchen, with my sister’s judging eyes staring daggers at my choice of footwear, I felt as if I was finally beginning to manifest the four years of hippie training I received.

Although I will no doubt be guilty of wearing an amalgamation of plaid, skinny jeans, and retro sneakers this fall when I return to AU, I might just have to substitute my shoes for my Tevas in the hopes that my inner hippie will neutralize my outward hipster.

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