The zoot suit was the popular style amongst hepcats. It incorporated baggy blazer jackets with pants, bright colors, thick chalk stripes, floppy hats, and long chains. Many zoot suiters would often wear a fedora or pork pie hat, color-coordinated with the suit. Occasionally they would have a long feather on the fedora or pork pie hat as decoration.
When conversing, hepcats would communicate in jive talk. Jive talk (also known as Harlem jive or simply Jive) is an African-American Vernacular English slang or vocabulary that was developed in urban African American communities. It was adopted more widely in African-American society and then later into the mainstream. This style of English dialect peaked in the 1940s.
In 1938, jazz bandleader and singer Cab Calloway published the first dictionary by an African-American. This dictionary was specified for jive talk and other phrases that were popular amongst African-American youth.
The words hep and jive". British author and poet Lemn Sissay remarked that "Cab Calloway was taking ownership of language for a people who, just a few generations before, had their own languages taken away."[1]Men in zoot suitsBy the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, hep began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940s hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster[2] in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster".[3] The entry for hipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz." In 1947, Gibson sought to clarify the switch in the record "It Ain't Hep" which musically describes the difference between the two terms.
By the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, hep began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940s hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster[2] in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster".[3]
The new philosophy of racial role reversal was transcribed by many popular hipster authors of the time. Norman Mailer's 1957 pamphlet, entitled The White Negro,[7] has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer described the hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm."[8] In a nod to Mailer's discussion of hipsterism, the United States' Cold War deployments of African-American culture and personalities for the purposes of public diplomacy has been discussed as "hipster diplomacy".[9]