In the first weeks we kept it decent and went to the hip and trendy coffee cafés, sipping on the soya latte macchiato and taking a lot of pictures of the interior. But it was time to take it a step further and include the other centres inside the hipster subculture.

We experienced it’s quite hard to define a hipster because this certain subculture is polycentric with lot of layeredness and besides that, people just don't like to be stereotyped or pigeonholed.So this week we planned to do interviews with the shop owners in the Stationstraat and participatory observation in a coffeeshop and the Hall of Fame.

First of all we went to the Grass Company, which is the biggest coffee shop in Tilburg and also located between the Stationstraat and the Hall of Fame. If you walk past the Grass Company you will notice that it’s pretty cozy inside, and indeed when we checked the interior it was almost similar to some interiors of the hip coffee cafés in the Stationstraat. Wooden chairs and tables, industrial lamps and some vague art hanging on the walls. They offer a bunch of old fashioned board games like Stratego, game of goose and card decks and also most of the signs hanging around where in English, the same as some part of the menu. People were just chilling, working on their computers, reading or playing the board games with their friends. A lot of similarities with the café Locals, except that besides their coffee they were consuming marijuana.
The hall of fame, founded by a couple young kids from Tilburg is mostly focusing on cultural diversity. On the website of hall of fame is written that their goals is to bring together the subcultures of Tilburg, in order to stimulate each other. What kind of subculture you see at the hall of fame depends on the event hosted that day. One time there will be a new wave punk band playing and the other time you will see some hippies dancing on psychedelic music. Almost everytime at some concert or event, you will see a couple of hipsters, which indicate the layeredness we mentioned before. The people visiting these places are between 18 and 35, with sometimes older people who are still mentally young, and the use of English words during a conversation is fascinating if you pay attention to it.

Through the interviews we found out that the owners of the cafes and shops just added the English words in their menus just because it sounded cooler. Assuming that the consumers had a certain level of English education and embrace the Anglicization of the Dutch language. Choosing local products is a deliberate choice, because the owners thought it was important to support the locals, but also just because it was just convenient to get it around the corner, instead importing it. The same goes for the interior, the one went for the living-room vibe, the other went for a interior styled by students of the Dutch Design Academic and SamSam with his charming owners went for the overstuffed version. Beside they are local orientated they are also focusing on the global phenomena of social media, using Instagram and Facebook to promote the shops. They did not on purpose aimed for hipster consumers when they started with their cafes and shops but it just happened.

During our visit at the Grasscompany we had a moment of elucidation of which direction we want to go with our research and how to connect our findings with sociological theories.
By drinking fairtrade coffee and eating local products and sometimes vegan/vegatarian in their second hand clothes these hipsters of Tilburg are unconsciously making a political statement. However, not for the sake of it. This behavioural pattern leads us to the concepts of “taste” and “habitus” of Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and that shape current practices and structures. In the practices of current Hipster culture, you can see the trails of different previous cultures. When they consume second hand clothes or vegan products, we can not claim that they are doing it for rejecting the capitalist consuming habits or industrialisation of food market. These practices are reproduced unconsciously, by the people via repetition, for the sake of being belong to a certain habitus, without any deliberate pursuit of coherence and without any conscious concentration. Thus, by looking at the “taste” among Hipsters, we can also see that the habitus of Hipsters, like others, ‘is not fixed or permanent, and can be changed under unexpected situations or over a historical period, even geographically, one can spot the differences between practices hipsters in Tilburg and in other cities, and other countries. In this sense, Peirce’s conceptualization of “thirdness” also coincide with this analysis of practices of hipsters. Everywhere we went, we where able to spot the hipsters, it's all about semiotics.