An article in The Guardian about the definition of Cool reports on findings by the American Psychological Society that there are six characteristics people perceive in cool people:
extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous
The article goes on to briefly reference the history cool (and to be honest, I’d never thought about where the idea of cool came from) such as the “aristocratic cool” of Renaissance Europeans:
Some suggest that sprezzatura, an Italian word first used about by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 and defined as “a certain nonchalance, to conceal all art and make what one does or say appear to be without effort” captures the earliest essence of what cool is.
And:
Cool as a characterisation originated from 1940s jazz culture, when the black musician Lester Young challenged racial norms by refusing to smile when performing. He also used fashion as a marker of defiance, wearing sunglasses indoors on stage. Not long after he coined the slang term “that’s cool”, his fans began to use it when referencing him.
(Here I ask whether “fashion” is actually an aspect of someone being cool; see instead below for consumerist cool.) Professor Joel Dinerstein of Tulane University Louisiana teaches a topic called The History of Cool and gives these as the qualities of cool:
“rebellious” and “charismatic”, flagging that another key quality is self-authorisation.
Chris Black – of the How Long Gone podcast – gives these definitions:
someone “being comfortable with who they are and what they say” is his “real baseline for coolness”
And:
“being very, very good at what they do”, saying it “shows a level of dedication and self-respect that I think is deeply cool”
(Which seems to me utterly subjective.) The writer of The Guardian article suggests that there is a wider societal mode of coolness:
Nowadays, social media means being cool is often less about a person and more about an aesthetic that can be carefully curated. Unlike a person, however, as soon as an item becomes mainstream, it is generally no longer deemed cool.
For me, Lester Young’s usage is closest to what I think is cool. It’s an authentic, autonomous expression of composure (or reserve) – a somewhat ironic detachment which distances itself from authority rather than directly confronting it. It also involves a state of calm which deliberately avoids conflict as Shakespeare has Queen Gertrude tell Hamlet: “O gentle son, upon the heat and flame of thy distemper, sprinkle cool patience”.
There’s a 1997 Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker in which Gladwell observes the “trickle up” of fashion trends from the street and he posits that:
the first rule of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on
And:
Cool is a set of dialects, not a language.
And:
the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one
And:
the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermeneutic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them.
The trouble with Gladwell’s account and his rules is that they refer to a consumerist cool – which definitely isn’t cool. It’s not authentic and lacks naturalness; it’s a pose for other people to look and acknowledge the cool they themselves want to foster. A consumerist cool has to gaze upon its own sense of cool. A truly cool person wouldn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought. They just are. Ding an sich.