Celebrity, for those who can't be bothered to do it

Film

Richard Linklater

The director seemed to have reached his Generation-X zenith with his non-linear classic Slacker (above) in 1991 - but since then he has dazzled while refusing to be pigeon-holed into any particular genre or medium. His output is prolific and completely uncategorisable: recent credits include School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation. A stoner auteur turned modern-day Kubrick.

Music

Damon Albarn

Having helped to spearhead the provincial, insular attitudes of Britpop, Albarn has spent the last 10 years making up for lost time in a prolific, genre-hopping spree that has taken in world music, hip hop and electronica among his various side projects (with collaborators including punk legends and cartoonist former flatmates). Back in the 1990s, who'd have put money on him being the last man standing?

Fashion

Kate Moss

The perfect slacker career path: hang about at JFK airport, smoking cigarettes and acting gangly. Get discovered. Fly around the world looking awkward but beautiful as the face of modern androgyny. Date rock stars.

Literature

Geoff Dyer

Dyer's first novel, The Colour of Memory, is considered by many to be the only significant work of fiction to come out of the slacker movement. His preparation for writing a book about hanging out in Brixton, unemployed, smoking too much dope, was to live exactly that lifestyle for many years. But do not imagine that Dyer - who later wrote the best-selling Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It - lacks any direction: his writing is rammed with a bewildering array of cultural references that at some point he has found the time and energy to digest.

Business

Tom Hodgkinson

The Idler magazine, brainchild of Hodgkinson and a team of like- minded professional time-wasters, has evolved from what appeared to be an in-joke dreamt up in the pub to a viable publishing empire, with spinoff best-selling books ( Crap Towns, The Cloudspotters' Guide) - not to mention pioneering the reintroduction of absinthe into the UK - all because of a dedication to the life of idle leisure.

TV

Louis Theroux

The epitome of a Generation-X role model turned good: Theroux (just to make it better, the privileged son of a famous writer) has honed an air of feigned nonchalance to his documentaries, allowing him to disarm his subjects with an apparent ad-hoc approach to his art, as if embarrassed to reveal any real work or research went into it.

Acting

Chloe Sevigny

She shocked the world by getting high and swearing in Kids; surprised everyone by turning in an Oscar-nominated performance in Boys Don't Cry; and then took the unusual move of performing oral sex on camera in The Brown Bunny. But you can't keep a good Gen X- er down, so to speak, and she has now settled into a role as muse, credible actress and darling of the fashion A-list, thanks to a dedication to thrift stores. Only a Gen X-er could ride that paradox.

Cookery

Jamie Oliver

He may seem the epitome of a Thatcherite entrepreneur, but Oliver helped to revolutionise the way in which cooking was perceived by young males in Britain.

Effortless, impressive and trendy - all of a sudden scootering down to the local butchers was made to look like a lifestyle choice, thanks to a few skewed camera angles and a laissez-faire attitude to recipes. Extend this to school dinners and philanthropy and, in his own haphazard way, he has entirely changed the culture of eating in Britain.

Philosophy

Alain de Botton

By no means a slacker or underachiever, Alain de Botton nonetheless typifies the last two decades' attitude towards serious thought: package it up in handy, bite-sized pieces, apply it to trendy lifestyle issues and you need never plough through the impenetrable, repetitive ideas of Jean Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein et al again (or ever). After all, why worry about moral imperatives and the nature of being when we've got neighbour envy to concern ourselves with?

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