They’re so non-conformist, they dress alike to fight conformity.
Via Boston Globe:
You can spot a nonconformist a mile away. Because they all look alike. Just ask mathematician Jonathan Touboul, an associate professor at Brandeis University.
Like the rest of us, Touboul has noticed that people who strive to look different usually end up looking the same. He’s even given it a name: “the hipster effect.” But Touboul has gone one step further, by coming up with a mathematical explanation for why it happens.
Touboul’s dense, bewildering paper on the hipster effect has made him a celebrity in the abstruse world of higher math. And the premise of his work was ironically confirmed when it was written up on MIT Technology Review, a website run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A reader of the review article threatened to sue, claiming that his photo had been used without permission to illustrate the story. Only it wasn’t the reader’s photo, but a generic image of a plaid-shirted, bearded hipster purchased from a stock-photo agency.