Coolness has traditionally been defined by detachment and individuality, but it is now often associated with social and political activism. Younger generations see caring about issues like racial and social justice as cool. As a result, companies and celebrities now feel pressure to take public stances on issues in order to appeal to these audiences and be seen as cool. Social media has also contributed to the redefinition of cool by allowing more voices to be heard and creating new norms where political engagement is expected. Some historians argue that cool may have changed so much from its original definition that it is no longer the same concept.

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What cool means now
November 15, 2020
For more than two decades, Joel Dinerstein, a cultural
historian and professor of English at Tulane University in
New Orleans, Louisiana, has been asking his students
who and what they consider cool. The author of multiple
books on the subject, including 2017’s The Origins of
Cool in Postwar America, Dinerstein teaches a course on
the history of cool. About five or six years ago, or
perhaps a little more—he can’t remember exactly—he
noticed a change in what his students were telling him.
“They no longer thought of any given iconic figure or
celebrity as cool if they didn’t also have a social activist
or political activist—if not an agenda, at least a stance,”
he says. “That was completely new. Cool and politics

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were not really connected for a long time, and certainly
not at the beginning.”
When Black Americans first coined the term in the jazz
clubs of the late 1930s, a period of racist Jim Crow
laws that left little hope of political change, cool
described a composed detachment and emphasis on the
musician’s individuality. It wasn’t about correcting
injustices, but keeping your head despite them. It has
since mutated a good deal, growing into an alternate
form of status that applies as much to products and
brands as people.
In 2020 cool is as influential as ever. Only today, it
reflects an era defined by the rising urgency of climate
change, by movements such as Black Lives Matter
calling ever louder for racial and social justice, by
political strife, and not least of all, by social media.
Where for most of its history cool was characterized by

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a reserved dispassion, to be cool now often includes
being informed and concerned about what’s happening
in the world—or, at minimum, looking like you do. The
transformation may be so great that Dinerstein wonders
whether coolness as we have traditionally known it could
be dead.
The stakes aren’t purely academic. For decades cool has
been among the most powerful elements in marketing
and integral to the identities of some of the world’s most
successful companies. It was key to the brand
images Nike and Apple built in the 1980s, and it remains
crucial for new generations of companies from
Supreme to Tesla. Businesses that fail to understand it
may risk their relevance, and with that, their customers.
The present atmosphere is changing what those
customers consider cool, affecting what they buy, the
companies they support, and the public figures they
follow.

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It’s cool to care
If you’re looking to observe cool in action, there are few
venues as reliable as fashion. An industry where sales
rely on image and trends more than the pure function of
products, it is particularly attuned to cool.
When I recently asked Sara Maggioni, head of
womenswear at WGSN, a London-based trend
forecaster, what’s cool in 2020, she didn’t list brands,
celebrities, or clothing styles. “It’s cool to care now,” she
said. “The younger generation wants relationship, they
want authenticity, they want more meaningful
connection. Education is cool right now. Being politically
active. The mindset has definitely shifted.”
The younger generation…want more meaningful
connection. The mindset has definitely shifted.
Sarah Andelman has a reputation for spotting cool.
Before founding brand consultancy Just An Idea, she

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was co-founder and creative director of revered Parisian
concept store Colette, which closed in 2017. She said in
an email, “I think what’s cool today is to care for others
and for the planet in general.”
Different forms of social consciousness animate some of
the industry’s most exciting young and emerging labels.
Sustainability is core to the work of French designer
Marine Serre, whose moon-print tops and
bodysuits have become celebrity must-haves. American
Emily Bode devises clothes from thrifted fabrics she
upcycles into novel creations for her namesake line.
Kerby Jean-Raymond, founder of New York label Pyer
Moss, and the new vice president of creative direction at
Reebok, has been outspoken on issues of racial justice
and at times used his clothes to highlight instances of
Black Americans’ overlooked influence on US culture.

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Big-name companies, meanwhile, have been at pains to
prove their caring credentials. Fast-fashion giants such
as H&M and Zara are touting their sustainability efforts.
Luxury labels like Gucci built on exclusivity
are promoting inclusivity and diversity. Brands now
routinely exhort viewers to vote and runway shows
include slogans supporting social causes.
Reuters/Piroschka van de Wouw
Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri has made feminist
slogans a recurring feature of her runway shows.
Skeptics might question whether these displays
are sincere or for show. Fashion board rooms are still
lagging on diversity, even as companies are hiring more
diverse models to be their faces. Corporations are calling
out racial injustice in the US, but they remain silent on
China’s brutal treatment of its Uighur ethnic minority,
evidently for fear of losing sales in the lucrative market.

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This summer, when Adidas took to social media to
condemn racism following the widespread protests over
ongoing police killings of Black Americans, it sparked a
backlash within the company from Black employees who
said the company wasn’t addressing racism in its own
workplace. Even so, the displays of caring show
companies recognize that taking a stand can be
beneficial, and possibly necessary, particularly as
they try to appeal to Gen Z shoppers.
Pre-existing ideas of cool haven’t vanished in this
atmosphere. Plenty of products and people regarded as
cool aren’t overtly linked to social or political activism,
from TikTok influencers to sneakers such as retro Air
Jordans and lots more. But now even fashion
outlets such as Highsnobiety and Teen Vogue mix
politics with their coverage of products and trends.

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While companies and celebrities occasionally took
stances in the past, including icons such as Muhammad
Ali, activism isn’t just more common but also carries
more weight in how we define cool. Through the late
1980s and 1990s, for example, the coolest basketball
player on the planet was Michael Jordan, who famously
kept out of politics during his playing years and once
joked that Republicans buy sneakers, too. Today the title
of coolest basketball player probably belongs to LeBron
James, whose social work and advocacy for racial justice
are as much part of his image as his game on the court.
In a 2017 study Google commissioned on what teens see
as cool, they ranked celebrities who are “philanthropic
and genuine” as the coolest (pdf). Having a platform
practically necessitates having an opinion. It’s now
common to find an actor like Emma Watson promoting
feminism, or singers such as Cardi B, Megan Thee

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Stallion, and Taylor Swift expressing their views on
politics or other issues.
“This is something we’ve been talking about for a couple
of years, but for sure we are seeing such an acceleration
now,” WGSN’s Maggioni says. “You have people who, a
couple of years ago, would have never posted something
political. Now they feel almost like they have to.”
What “cool” is
Today’s notion of cool looks very different from what
preceded it. For decades, the stereotype was being
detached and aloof. At its birth, the musical form of cool,
developed by musicians such as Lester Young, the jazz
saxophonist credited with popularizing the term, meant
calm intensity. As opposed to an overheated frenzy, the
sound was relaxed and measured—cool.
Listen to a playlist of tracks representing the
original sound of cool as it first evolved in jazz.

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A similar attitude animated the loner heroes of 1930s
noir stories like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, as
Dinerstein details in his book on cool’s origins, and later,
figureheads of existentialism such as Albert Camus.
Their outlook boiled down to resigned self-possession in
the face of a senseless or morally corrupt world.
Remember, this was the aftermath of global traumas
such as World War I and the Great Depression.
In jazz, cool didn’t just break from musical precedents.
It also defied ideas of how a Black artist was supposed
to perform on stage. The predominately white audiences
of the time expected Black musicians to smile and
entertain, like Black performers in minstrel shows and
movies. Black artists risked losing work or facing
violence if they didn’t comply. But in the 1930s, Black
jazz musicians began to reject these tropes and present
themselves as self-controlled, even unemotional. “The
new response to the white gaze of superiority was to

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drop the grinning black mask—the symbol of
accommodation,” Dinerstein writes.
Ronald Startup/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty
Images
Lester Young looking incredibly cool.
Through the 1940s, jazz-loving white outsiders such as
the Beats picked up on cool, including its non-conformist
undertones, which could involve hedonism and drug use.
They disseminated it to mainstream America, where in
the subsequent decades it evolved in response to “the
social norms of a materialist and rapidly suburbanizing
society,” as Dinerstein puts it. Cool turned into what he
describes as an “umbrella term for the alienated attitude
of American rebels.” Actors Marlon Brando and James
Dean became its face in Hollywood, just at the time
teenagers surfaced as a recognized demographic.
Perhaps it’s because of their perpetual search for identity

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and independence, but teens would become some of
the biggest consumers of cool.
Though class had traditionally determined social rank,
cool took hold as a separate kind of status—one that
would prove useful to marketers. By the 1960s, they
were mining counterculture to brand and sell products,
and in the 1980s, companies such
as Nike and Apple were building brand images around
rebellion. Cool became commoditized. Yet that note of
defiance has persisted through its transformations over
the decades, at least as cool is understood in the US and
western Europe. (It has different connotations in a
country such as India, where it isn’t generally associated
with hedonism or deviance.)
Caleb Warren is an associate professor of marketing at
the University of Arizona who has been studying cool for
15 years, particularly as it applies to brands and

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products. His research has found that consumers in the
West associate a variety of different attributes with
coolness, including aesthetic appeal, originality, high
status, and more. But at its core, according to Warren,
are really a few essential features. One is an element of
being positive or pleasing. “A lot of people will actually
just use it as a synonym for ‘I like it,’ or ‘I think it’s
good,'” he explains. “But where it becomes its own thing
is this other dimension, which is autonomy.”
Autonomy is the willingness to follow one’s own course
regardless of what societal norms dictate or others
expect. It suggests authenticity, individuality, and even
rebellion, which other research has also identified as
integral to cool.
This autonomy does have to obey certain rules. In a
series of experiments that Warren and Margaret
Campbell, a professor of marketing at University of

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Colorado, summarized in a 2014 paper, they found
autonomy increases coolness but only when it’s positive.
That means it differs from the norm in a way that isn’t
too extreme, or it risks losing its positive spin, and the
norm has to be one the perceiver considers illegitimate.
Examples could include anything from rejecting stylistic
conventions to pushing back against old authorities, as
Black jazz musicians did.
Doing his own thing.
Today, rebuffing outdated or illegitimate norms
describes advocating for racial justice, gay rights,
feminism, environmentalism, and other issues,
suggesting the new activist form of cool isn’t a total
departure from the original. It still has a dim view of the
world at times, but it’s more optimistic about its ability
to change it, or at least to try. The progressive bent is
probably no coincidence. Generally speaking, cool is

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anti-establishment, and conservatives, almost by
definition, often seek to preserve the establishment.
Dinerstein notes that much of the cultural rebellion tied
to cool in the past has aligned more closely with the
political left, even if cool wasn’t explicitly linked to
activism.
What’s tricky about cool, though, is that it is subjective.
Subcultures have their own ideas of cool separate from
the mainstream, and different demographics may not
agree on what’s cool. Just look at the different
reactions to Nike putting former football player Colin
Kaepernick in an ad campaign in 2018. The right has had
its own emblems of coolness, such as actor John Wayne,
who represented a masculine ideal vanishing in a rapidly
changing society. In today’s politically charged
atmosphere, it could include figures who attack political
correctness.

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Different standards of cool don’t need to have equal
support, and often don’t. The white mainstream in the
1930s, after all, didn’t look favorably on the Black jazz
musicians who created our modern idea of cool.
The forces reshaping cool
Movements for racial justice, feminism, and
environmentalism have been around for decades, so
why is cool changing now? It’s not entirely clear, but a
few factors may be involved.
One is generational change, a force perpetually
redefining cool. In the US, for example, more than half
the population is now millennial or younger. These
groups are more racially diverse than their forebears and
more likely to support movements such as Black Lives
Matter. They’re more educated and less likely to
adhere to traditional gender roles (pdf). They’re
more concerned about the environment, having grown

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up understanding climate change as an existential
threat. And for some time younger populations have
been engaging in more activism, too.
Students at a protest calling for action on climate change
in Los Angeles.
“What society views as positive changes over time,”
Warren says. “So as these issues become viewed more
positively by society, you’re more likely to see if people
can stand out on those issues, or advance them beyond
what was normally being done. And they might seem
more cool.”
Another undeniable influence—one that’s helped shape
the beliefs of those younger generations—is the internet,
and particularly social media. It has fundamentally
changed the way information spreads and how people
connect. Voices that had little means of being heard
before now have a megaphone, and injustices that were

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once only visible to those affected, such as police
brutality, are now seen by all, engaging even those who
aren’t directly involved. The Black Lives Matter protests
this June, which reached far past Black communities in
the US to include demonstrations all over the world,
would hardly have been conceivable without video
footage of police violence spreading online.
It has created new norms, and new behaviors have
followed. Much as class markers look different today,
some of the ways we perform cool have shifted. Social
media has become one of cool’s most powerful venues,
joining—if not overtaking—mediums like television and
movies. While being cool still involves showing off style
or individuality, it may also come with a display of caring
about topics like social justice or climate change. At its
worst this dynamic can lead to empty performative
activism, which actual activists and experts say isn’t
helpful and can be counterproductive. But the activism

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can be genuine too. People are multi-faceted, after all,
and living in modern society frequently means
navigating all these currents simultaneously.
Has the idea of cool changed so much, though, that it’s
not actually the same thing anymore? “I have wondered
for a good six to 10 years whether or not cool is itself
dead,” Dinerstein says. “Like whether it was a certain
sensibility or certain quality, it lasted for 60, 70 years,
and now whatever we want to call it, it’s already
something different.”
For maybe the first time since the 1960s, he notes,
politics has subsumed everything else and made the
traditional signifiers of cool, such as style, less
important. At the same time, social media has redrawn
the cultural landscape.
“This is another reason why that whole detachment
aspect of cool has disappeared: Social media almost

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requires you as that kind of [celebrity] figure, or even as
just a person, to constantly be engaged,” he says.
“That’s why I have a problem as a theorist and historian
who analyzes cool figuring out where cool is at the
moment, because all of the rules by which it was formed
and sustained itself have completely been upended by
social media.”
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Warren doesn’t believe cool is fundamentally different
than in the past, but he does think social media is
causing notable shifts. “One, it’s probably sped up the
cycles, so things become cool quicker and lose their
coolness quicker, because the information is traveling so
much faster,” he says. “The other thing is it might have
democratized it a bit more.”
Every industry generally had a set of insiders dictating
what was cool. In music that might have meant certain

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artists, record labels, or DJs. In fashion it might have
included select designers, editors, or stores. Now,
because of platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and
SoundCloud in the West, or in China a sprawling network
like Weibo, there may be thousands of figures with
followings large and small—the so-called
microinfluencers—shaping tastes and trends.
Experts have similarly argued the mass market is
fragmenting into a universe of micro-markets, formed of
communities coalesced around shared tastes and
beliefs. In fashion, for instance, critics have said
trends don’t work as they once did. There are fewer era-
defining looks and more niche styles that quickly rise
and fall in popularity. Big trends can still appear.
Streetwear, a style with roots in skate culture and hip-
hop, has been a dominant force in recent years. But
consumer communities dictated its popularity, and the
industry establishment followed their lead.

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Cool’s future may look like a constellation of different
niche ideas of cool, split along political lines, where mass
cool becomes harder to achieve. Maybe the only
certainty is that what’s cool will continue to change,
following the lead of wider society, shaping how
companies and public figures act.