- Also spelled:
- hippy
hippie
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What is a hippie?
Hippies were members of a countercultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s that rejected mainstream American life's morals. Originating on college campuses in the United States, the movement spread to other countries like Canada and Britain.
Largely white, middle-class teenagers and young adults, hippies felt alienated from middle-class society, which they viewed as materialistic and repressive. They developed their own unique lifestyle, experimenting with communal living, vegetarian diets, and holistic medicine. Hippies favored long hair, beards, casual dress, and psychedelic colors. They advocated nonviolence and love, promoting openness and tolerance and often seeking spiritual guidance from Eastern religions. They also promoted recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs like marijuana and LSD to expand consciousness. Folk and rock music were integral to hippie culture, with artists like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead closely identified with the movement. The word 'hippie' comes from the word 'hip,' which means up-to-date and fashionable.
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When and where did the hippie subculture begin?
The hippie subculture emerged in the United States during the 1960s, specifically on college campuses. It began in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district as a burgeoning counterculture movement around 1965. The term "hippie" gained national and international recognition by 1967.
Hippies were largely white, middle-class youths who felt alienated from middle-class society, which they saw as dominated by materialism and repression. They developed their own distinctive lifestyle, favoring long hair, unconventional dress, and communal living arrangements. They advocated nonviolence and love, often expressing this through the phrase "Make love, not war".
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What were some beliefs and values of hippies?
Hippies, largely white middle-class youths, felt alienated by what they saw as the materialism and repression of middle-class society. They developed a distinctive lifestyle that demonstrated their sense of marginality through communal living, vegetarian diets, and holistic medicine.
Hippies advocated nonviolence and love, epitomized by the slogan "Make love, not war," which earned them the nickname "flower children". They valued openness and tolerance, rejecting the restrictions they perceived in middle-class society. They explored spirituality outside traditional Judeo-Christian religions, experimented with recreational drug use to expand consciousness, and integrated folk and rock music into their culture.
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How did hippies express themselves through music, fashion, and art?
Hippies expressed themselves through music, fashion and art as part of a distinctive lifestyle that rejected materialism and repression.
Music
Both folk and rock music were integral to hippie culture. Musicians and groups like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane were closely identified with the movement. Psychedelic rock reflected drug-induced states using feedback, electronics, and intense volume.
Fashion
Hippies favored long hair and casual, unconventional dress, sometimes in psychedelic colors. Men grew beards, and both men and women wore sandals and beads. Long, flowing granny dresses were popular with women, as were rimless granny glasses with both men and women. A popular song of the time, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)," captured this image.
Art
Hippies spawned psychedelic light shows, new forms of dancing, improvisational music, groundbreaking fashion, and eye-catching poster art.
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What important events or gatherings were associated with the hippie movement?
Hippies engaged in public gatherings that were part music festivals, protests, or celebrations of life. The first "be-in" was the Gathering of the Tribes in San Francisco in 1967, which started the Summer of Love, drawing up to 100,000 counterculture members to the Haight-Ashbury district.
Outdoor music festivals were another form of public gathering, with about 300 performances in the United States from 1967 to 1971. The best-known festivals were held in 1969 and included Woodstock in rural New York and the free concert at Altamont Speedway near Livermore, California.
Hippies also participated in teach-ins at colleges and universities to explain opposition to the Vietnam War, antiwar protests and marches, and the "moratorium" against the war in 1969. They were also involved in the development of the environmental movement, and many participated in teach-ins that educated listeners in the importance of environmental conservation on the first Earth Day in 1970.
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How did the hippie subculture influence society and culture in the years that followed?
The hippie movement had a lasting influence on society and culture despite its decline in the mid-1970s. Hippies introduced more relaxed attitudes towards sex and a heightened concern for the environment. Their attire and practices, such as vegetarianism and interest in Eastern cultures, entered mainstream culture.
Hippies were largely white, middle-class youths who felt alienated by what they saw as the materialism and repression of middle-class society. They advocated nonviolence and love, experimenting with communal living, vegetarianism, and holistic medicine. They also sought spiritual guidance from outside traditional Judeo-Christian religions, exploring Buddhism, Hinduism, and astrology. Hippies promoted recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs to expand consciousness.
The movement is associated with folk and rock music, with artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones identified with the culture. The musical Hair and the film Easy Rider also reflected hippie values.
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hippie, member, during the 1960s and 1970s, of a countercultural movement that rejected the mores of mainstream American life. The movement originated on college campuses in the United States, although it spread to other countries, including Canada and Britain. The name derived from “hip,” a term applied to the Beats of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were generally considered to be the precursors of hippies. Although the movement arose in part as opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–75), hippies were often not directly engaged in politics, as opposed to their activist counterparts known as “Yippies” (Youth International Party).
Hippie lifestyle
Hippies were largely a white, middle-class group of teenagers and twentysomethings who belonged to what demographers call the baby-boom generation. They felt alienated from middle-class society, which they saw as dominated by materialism and repression. Hippies developed their own distinctive lifestyle, whereby they constructed a sense of marginality. They experimented with communal or cooperative living arrangements, and they often adopted vegetarian diets based on unprocessed foods and practiced holistic medicine. Hippies were also known for their unique style, favouring long hair and casual, often unconventional, dress, sometimes in “psychedelic” colours. Many males grew beards, and both men and women wore sandals and beads. Long flowing so-called granny dresses were popular with women, and rimless granny glasses with both men and women. For many The Whole Earth Catalog, which first appeared in 1968, became a source for the necessities of life. It was crucial for former urban dwellers who practiced semi-subsistence farming in rural areas (in what came to be called the back-to-the-land movement). Hippies tended to be dropouts from society, forgoing regular jobs and careers, although some developed small businesses that catered to other hippies. Many critics noted that hippies had the luxury of being able to “check out” of society and remarked on the incongruity of hippies’ participation in the civil rights movement, wherein Black Americans were fighting for the right to fully participate in society.
Hippies advocated nonviolence and love, a popular phrase being “Make love, not war,” for which they were sometimes called “flower children.” They promoted openness and tolerance as alternatives to the restrictions and regimentation they saw in middle-class society. Hippies often practiced open sexual relationships and lived in various types of family groups. They commonly sought spiritual guidance from sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern religions, and sometimes in various combinations. Astrology was also popular, and the period was often referred to as the Age of Aquarius. Hippies promoted the recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs, particularly marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), in so-called head trips, justifying the practice as a way of expanding consciousness. Indeed, drugs were one of the reasons given for traversing the “hippie trail.” Between 1957 and 1978 some 100,000 young people from the United States and western Europe traveled overland through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or Greece to Turkey, India, Morocco, Iran, Afghanistan, or Nepal. In addition to drugs, they sought enlightenment, adventure, or something “exotic.”
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Both folk and rock music were an integral part of hippie culture. Singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and groups such as the Beatles, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Rolling Stones were among those most closely identified with the movement. The musical Hair, a celebration of the hippie lifestyle, opened on Broadway in 1968, and the film Easy Rider, which reflected hippie values and aesthetics, appeared in 1969. The novelist Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was one of the best-known literary spokesmen for the movement, but he became equally famous for the bus tours he made with a group called the Merry Pranksters.