New Books In Popular Culture

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. Alessandro Gerosa's The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024) analyses this complex set of related phenomena to argue that the quest for authenticity has been a driver of Western societies from the emersion of capitalism and industrial society to today. From this premise, the book advances multiple original contributions. First, it explains why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers' taste in late modern capitalism; second, it proposes a novel conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of consumption; third, the book cons