Maybe it’s Coppola or Wang, maybe it’s Passion Pit on vinyl or Jim Sturgess in a speakeasy or just the way time rolls. Nobody knows. But suddenly it was a log cabin in Wisconsin, not a bright boardwalk in California. Florence. Gaga. Rihanna in smoke and leather. Straggly browns and burnished reds, not tints and highlights in blonde. Labels disappeared into linings inside bags and vests, and Chucks in purple and green and tartan and pink spread till plain grey Vans were the new Chucks.

This is a call to arms to live and love and sleep together.

There was a change underway. Between high school in 2006 and college in 2009, the tectonic plates under America’s feet had been busy shifting the social paradigm around. The hipster was the new king, his feathered girlfriend was queen and Aphrodite. They ruled the campus and they owned the bars. Tits the cheerleader put blue feathers in her ears, Tits the cheerleader wore a leather band around her forehead and a flower in her hair. But Tits the cheerleader. She was Tits the cheerleader. Her dress was too tight, too synthetic. Her make-up too bright, too synthetic. She was glanced at a second too long, a fraction too strong. She did not fit. She should leave this brown bar in the Campus Arts District. She should go downtown and into a shiny, sweaty club. She was not for us. We were not for her two years ago, but she was not for us now.

We listen to Florence now, Tits. Britney Spears is a joke. Unless, of course, you’re the pretty little Ashton (denim hot pants and Hello Kitty tank).

Meanwhile, on the north side of campus, near the engineering and mathematical buildings, the bespectacled thickened their frames and tightened their jeans. As high school ended, really and truly ended, their stock rose. And they didn’t want Tits either. No, now they wanted the queens and the Aphrodites, and it was about time they had them. It was their due, overdue.

The youth are starting to change.

The people who have victory written in their stars, of course, use this gift. They use whatever it is—their luck or their gut, or just their irrefutable genes—to slide neatly into the right slots. Hell, they create their own slots. In their beauty and their brilliance, they are more lethal than Tits and her kind have ever been. They leave us gasping in their wake, widening the gaps, confirming that there will always, always be gaps.

They somehow knew, right after it was real and just before it was too late, to don the plaid, to go to Bonnaroo. They discovered MGMT right before 21 hit theatres. They’re in it, they shape it. They’re so good at absorbing and understanding that they can do what Tits can’t—they can change at will, so that the zeitgeist always forms around them.