Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times  Patrons at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, where new elements like valet parking have popped up.  SO, these signs have been popping up around the East End: a picture of a hat with a red slash through it.  Not just any hat, mind you, but a fedora.  What did a hat ever do to anyone? Why the chapeau chauvinism? Well, it’s complicated. And it’s really about those who wear the hat, and what it has come to represent in certain quarters, especially in the once happily sleepy, now unhappily besieged, hamlet of Montauk.  At its most superficial level, the fedora featured in the signs represents your basic hipster. And to some extent, it’s just part of what is shaping up as a countrywide anti-hipster movement. Something about artisanal tattoos; a bespoke, frontiersman beard; and, yes, a fedora perched atop the head just so is sending some people around the bend.  In these parts, the image of the hipster is also a stand-in for a more deeply seated suspicion that the whole look provides cover for a more privileged crowd that is intent upon importing to your neighborhood higher real estate, food and drink prices — and a new attitude that says, “I’m richer than you, I’m hipper than you and, gosh darn it, some things are going to change around here.”  As the Web site Diehipster.com puts it in a diatribe aimed at urban-based hipsters, “You’ve accomplished nothing over the last decade but displaced hard-working families, old-time residents and newly arrived immigrants who do not seek attention like you [Offensive Adjective Inappropriate for Family Newspaper].”  The view is still more pronounced in Montauk, which is feeling the full weight of its now well-established position as a “discovered” beach enclave whose proud self-image as a “drinking town with a fishing problem” has earned ceaseless coverage in fashion magazines and lifestyle sections like this one.  While this all began several years ago, this summer has seen a considerable, if anecdotal, spike in visitors, and there is a growing sense the town is hitting a tipping point.  Its wind-swept, pared-down sensibility is so in keeping with the fashion of the times that Neiman Marcus advertises on its Web site “Classic Montauk” skinny jeans, by Robert Graham. All manner of celebrity chefs and high-end, Manhattan nightclub impresarios have blown through town to put their stylish, beachy stamp on it. Foreign elements are popping up at the newer — and superbly designed — restaurants: valet parking (Navy Beach, the Surf Lodge) and late-night “security” (the Crow’s Nest); $70 drink pitchers (Ruschmeyer’s) and $27 lobster rolls (Montauk Beach House).  And while locals and longtime visitors can, and do, debate whether some of this is quite welcome, the overwhelming amount of trash the newly enlarged crowds tend to leave behind, including on the beaches, is not. And few would dispute that it has all brought with it something that is considered to be even dirtier by the old standards of the hamlet: status, conspicuous displays of it.  No one has described the old anti-status mood of the place better than Lili Adams, the owner of the beloved food cart the Ditch Witch. In an interview with The New York Times a few years ago, she painted a scene of three guys at a Montauk bar: “Two of them are millionaires and one is a bum, but you could never tell who was who.”  The fear is now overwhelming that this humble sensibility is being chased away. And that’s where the hat comes in. “It’s not just a hat, it’s the attitude that goes with it,” said Rob Devlin, the owner of the West Lake Clam and Chowder House, a Montauk fixture that has remained overwhelmingly popular in the face of all the new establishments. “The attitude is, ‘Hey, I’m So-and-So.’ ”  Mr. Devlin’s anti-fedora sign is featured prominently by his outdoor bar with the phrase “Save Montauk.” He said he was happy for the new customers. (“They do put my kids through college.”) All he is asking for is a little more respect for what is already here (and, perhaps, an end to the expense-account approach of splitting a bill seven ways on seven credit cards).
Montauk is reacting against an influx of hipsters, visitors who act smarter, richer and better than the locals.