Barista Ken, rocking a man bun, a denim apron, mocha skin and a cool attitude

The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll. It was that ken who inspired Wendy Pojmann to investigate the whole phenomenon of barista cool and how the look of the professional Italian barista went out into the world, mutated in different ways, and returned to establish itself in selected spots in Italy. Pojmann concludes that “Barista Ken truly captures the globalized cool of espresso culture”.

Barista Ken, she also points out “may be … of mixed-race origins”. The bar owners and baristas that Grazia Ting Deng studied for her PhD, which later became the book Chinese Espresso, are by no means mixed race; they are pure Chinese. They are following in the footsteps of the many migrant Italians who took over neighbourhood bars to work for a better life. As they retire, and with children who don’t want to work in a bar, they sold to a new wave of migrants — from China.

As both Wendy Pojmann and Grazia Ting Deng discovered, very little is constant even in the fiercely traditional world of Italian espresso.

Notes

Wendy Pojmann’s article is Barista Cool: Espresso Fashion Transformed. She is also the author of Espresso: the art and soul of Italy.
Grazia Ting Deng’s book is Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. Her website contains links to other interviews and articles.
For an update on the icon of the hipster barista, take a look at an article from The New Statesman
espresso
Here’s the transcript.

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