The aesthetisation of artisanal food in the urban Hipster Economy

The advent of the twenty-first century has given back to artisanal products their honoured place back in post-industrial society (Kroezen et al., 2021) in the heart and palate of consumers. The urban ‘hipster economy’, especially food and beverage sectors, is leading this phenomenon (Ocejo, 2017). Chris Land (2018) defines this movement as ‘neo-craft’, describing how the preservation of traditional craft imaginary combines with innovative, skilful manufacturing of high-quality products. Based on a corpus of 40 semi-structured interviews with neo-craft entrepreneurs, this conference presentation will illustrate some key insights from a forthcoming monograph – titled ‘The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism’. In particular, it will illustrate how neo-craft entrepreneurs operate as taste and cultural intermediaries (Gerosa, 2021; Smith Maguire & Matthews, 2012) to aestheticise food with an artisanal, authentic aura. To make sense of this process of aesthetisation, it is necessary to properly embed the aesthetisation of artisanal food into the complex entanglement of macro-level aesthetic regimes of consumption and meso-level economic imaginaries of consumption. In particular, the aesthetisation of artisanal food is one of the purest manifestations of a hip aesthetic regime of consumption founded on authenticity, and a neo-craft economic imaginary of consumption. The contextualisation into macro and meso-level taste and market processes highlights the contradictory stance of such aesthetisation processes, between (sometimes explicit) counter-cultural or post-capitalist aspirations and functionality to market processes of capital accumulation. The latter part of the presentation will then focus on the contradicting features of the aesthetisation process, with particular attention to issues of class inequality and heritage.