Dumpster diving specifically, maybe not, but thrifting and second-hand clothes definitely were. When thrifting was popular among the early hipsters, American Ap

Dumpster diving specifically, maybe not, but thrifting and second-hand clothes definitely were. When thrifting was popular among the early hipsters, American Apparel would send buyers to thrift stores to gut them of all the best deals so they could offer curated collections of second-hand clothes at a steep markup. Companies like Urban Outfitters would send designers to Williamsburg parties to see what people were wearing so that they could start manufacturing knock-offs immediately. The hipster subculture is an odd one, itself a product of poor urban artists wearing and doing what they could afford being co-opted by college-educated urban Millennials trying to reject conventional symbols of elitism and instead crafting more "authentic" snobbery on the back of traditional working-class aesthetics. But if it had any potential to mean anything, it was murdered in the crib by those who cashed in on a demand for an aesthetic and divorced it from its meaning, which is the very thing that the early hipsters were rebelling against.