A conversation with Vanessa Brown

“What is cool?” asks the philosopher Thorsten Botz-Bornstein in Philosophy Now. It resists linear structures, he writes; “a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not.” Cool has a paradoxical nature, he concludes. My interviewee this week, Vanessa Brown, said it can sometimes be thought of as “the holy grail.”

Fashion activists talk about leveraging it to make consumption uncool and sustainable practices cool.  And indeed, the pendulum on sustainability did swing in the past few years; in 2019, many mainstream fashion brands and high-end luxury houses began to engage in practices marketed as more ethical or environmentally friendly.

Did sustainable fashion become cool? It certainly has become a widespread conversation, which has led to some positive change, and some greenwashing. But what if real change could come from a campaign around keeping your clothes for as long as possible, mending, sharing, etc.? Early in the COVID pandemic, the social media influencer Joshua Ostrovsky, known as @thefatjewish, posted on Instagram, “Climate Change needs to hire Corona Virus’s publicist.” Was he right? Could a ramped-up communications campaign around the climate crisis change people’s daily behaviors? 

It depends on the intention. Often “cool” is co-opted to sell more products. In this newsletter in 2020, I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of a tipping point: a “magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” Three years before he published The Tipping Point Gladwell wrote The Coolhunt, a story for The New Yorker about “coolhunters” employed by brands to observe what young people in certain areas were wearing and capitalize on trends – ultimately making them mainstream. I recommend the article; it is a fascinating exploration into how the 1990s changed how fashion was appropriated and marketed. 

Talking to Vanessa this week, I learned much about the history, nuances and complexities of cool theory. Vanessa, who is the course leader of MA Culture, Style and Fashion at Nottingham Trent University and the author of Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses, researches cool and fashionability.

Shonagh Marshall: I want to start by asking you: what is cool theory? And how did you start looking at it as an area of research?

Vanessa Brown: On a very basic level, coolness seems, somehow, really important. 

I first realized this when I was at art school in the late 80s doing my foundation course. You could draw a line in the room between the cool people and those who were not cool – I considered myself one of the not cool people. I'm not sure that I still think that, but I remember drawing these funny pictures of myself in my sketchbook, accentuating the characteristics that I thought made me “not cool”. Not smiling seemed to be quite a big part of being cool. 

There was a guy who used to hang out in the canteen; he was always kind of slumped in the chair, never that interested in anybody. He had this aura, which struck me then as coolness. That was what got me enchanted with the idea of cool as a form of distinction between people, a value system. 

In terms of what cool theory is, as I've said in my recent essay, it's several attempts – from a number of different places and different kinds of people – to work out what coolness is. How do we define it as a phenomenon? But also, how can we try to understand how it works? Knowing how coolness works is a little bit of a Holy Grail…. people imagine that this is the key to everything! Education, health promotion, and political engagement, for example. People hope that if something is perceived as a bit uncool, we could add this fairy dust that will get people engaged. 

But what 'cool' is, and whether you can apply it to something to change how it is perceived or change people's behavior, is still a question. Many people have tried. To some extent, it's thought you can manufacture cool because some branding and marketing campaigns have managed to do that. But even then, one of the problems is that there are multiple nuances to what cool actually is. Once I started studying it, that plurality was the thing that drew me into thinking about what this means for humans. Also, because I was involved in fashion education and have always been interested in critiques of consumer culture, I realized that those two things went together, that coolness was implicated in both these things in complicated ways. At that point, I thought maybe there's some purpose to studying cool beyond just the curiosity of a young person wondering why some people seem better than others.

Shonagh: What have you found in your research about the history of cool?

Vanessa: In terms of its academic study, people start talking about cool in modern, urban, Western societies from very early on, even though they don't use the term. Some of the first sociologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries noticed certain behaviors that could be considered cool. They got interested in fashion, and how fashion works to sum up the moment, and distinguish some people and exclude others. 

In a way, cool has been on the agenda ever since people studied everyday life. Certainly post the industrial revolution, with the growth of cities, the development of consumer culture, and greater social mobility. Urban, mass culture, and the anonymity that comes with that, I think, is a significant factor for some aspects of coolness. 

There was a lot of focus on cool in the early 90s, when people started to talk more about it, and a few essential books came out. Before that, there had been little bits within sociology; mainly people looking at subcultures and understanding that there was this unique quality that was quite hard to define, that some people had and some didn't. 

In the 90s there was a resurgence in the use of the word “cool”. People had spoken about hipness in the 60s (for example, Norman Mailer and his famous essay, The White Negro, which is undoubtedly about coolness). But the term cool was popularized again with Cool Britannia in the UK. In the publications that came out at that time, it was significant that coolness was no longer a proto-political or truly rebellious thing; it had become a form of consumption, something that people can buy and something that capitalism is using as a cloak, to mask what's really going on, selling dissent. At the time, people were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with mass consumption and the power of corporate brands. You can see that as a sort of watershed moment, where people stop talking about how people behave and what subcultures are and start thinking about this as something that can be bought and sold. 

Shonagh: That is so interesting, especially when you think about how people say that subcultures can no longer thrive today. Do you believe subcultures have been co-opted?

Vanessa: Some theorists certainly think coolness is not a good route to go down. Jim McGuigan says that cool is no longer cool; he's writing in the 2000s, and sees cool as entirely part of the neo-liberal capitalist system, fashionability and rebellion against a ‘mainstream’ all bound up in individualism and entrepreneurship of the self. I think that argument has a lot of validity. But I’m not sure if it can contain all types of coolness. I hope it cant. 

Again if you think about all the different nuances of cool… between the wars, there's a Weimar cool, and there's an aristocratic, British ‘Bright Young Thing’ type cool; both are about rebellion against the status quo. However, remember there are different ways of thinking about coolness, which is one of the reasons it can get so confusing. 

One is this idea of buying fashionability; coolness is merely a synonym for the fashionable. But coexisting alongside that, there is something else about dissatisfaction with the way things are, potentially coming from a sense of being excluded from mainstream culture. But this also comes from a feeling of being burnt out or abused by the pressures of modernity somehow. We seem to have attached some positive value to that, which I think is fascinating…. Even if you think about the kind of facial expression of the typical fashion model, this world-weariness comes with a lot of our most famous images of cool. If you think about Hollywood cool characters that emerged in the middle of the 20th century, there is an attitude of “I've faced too much modern life to care… about anything”. It is about being exposed to the modern world. You are part of it; but you've just decided not to be part of it; you've had too much of it. That may be because you're a rich kid, and you've got everything, and you're now bored, or because you're someone that is right at the other end of the social scale, and you've had enough. It's somewhat similar to the beat culture; the idea of being a beat is that you've just had it and can no longer imagine how you could impact the world other than creating yourself as this kind of fantastical monument to your own insignificance. 

I think about dandyism as well. There's a lot of good reasons to imagine the Regency dandies as proto-cool figures. They too were somehow aware of the massive changes that society was going through, and hoping to create some personal meaning and impact out of their appearance and behavior, not through being politically engaged. A kind of cachet that signaled “I'm so much part of this craziness that nothing you can throw at me will surprise me or wrong-foot me”. 

This lack of reaction can either come from incredible self-assurance, or from an acceptance of the way things are; and that might be a surface effect, because you might be in a state of rebellion or fear behind that facade. But your outer expression is all about looking assured and in control as if nothing can touch you. 

Globally, there are much older historical precedents for coolness too, outside of Western culture. Within the Yoruba people in Africa, there is a spirituality closely aligned with the goal of being cool. People have traced that to the experience of African Americans, from slavery and the cultural development that led to jazz and the coining of "cool" as a term of approval. 

Then also, historically, in the European aristocracy, there was a robust model of this idea of unflappability and effortlessness. Much practice goes into appearing effortless though! And you can see the correlation with fashion here… you're putting in a lot of effort to look as if you're entirely nonchalant. 

There's also something about the way fashion works as a kind of temporal measure, a marker of where we are in time. From it, we can tell how up-to-date we are with our fashions or our interpretation of them. That creates a challenge for people; it threatens their composure. Looking composed and self-assured is not just about the social side of fashion, as in, if I wear the right clothes, I will feel confident with that particular group of people. It is also temporal because every time fashion changes, we are asked to change; we are potentially uprooted from what we thought was right and asked to reassimilate what's going on around us. How you react to that is a measure, perhaps, of how equal you are to the challenge of being an integrated human in the modern context. I think that's why fashion has this poetic ability to stand for modernity as a whole. If modernity is all about the immense chaos of rapid change, it's also about how well we are able to adapt. Ultimaely, I think modern cool is slightly different from those earlier types of cool that I've mentioned because it is also about this ability to adapt in a way that seems easy, natural and in tune with the now. 

It is thought of as rather silly to follow fashion by some people. Other people see it as incredibly important, though they may not be able to articulate why that is - I think it is about the sense that you're on top of it, you're able to make sense of the moment, and you're not being left behind. It's precisely the same with technology. It's another one of those massive forces in modernizing societies that threatens to disturb and exclude successive groups of people. When people age, they experience that even more because they have a sense of not being in a time that they fit into; they become increasingly aware of whether or not to try to keep up and how to keep up. But fashion and technology are now moving so fast everyone recognizes this challenge. To summarize, it's about the enormity of the challenge to people's sense of self and purpose of equipped-ness to deal with what's going on around them, and fashion is a fantastic metaphor for that.

1 Granary

Shonagh: Are there specific group dynamics or signifiers consistently considered cool? Or is this constantly in flux? 

Vanessa: One of the defining elements is that it has to be dynamic; it has to constantly change. That is one of the things that makes cool challenging to study. If you start to talk about cool, somebody in your audience will position themselves as beyond it. People writing about cool often joke that whatever you select as an example probably isn't cool anymore by the time you've noticed it. 

This is for several reasons. One of them is the idea of cool as a form of social distinction like class, especially among the young; but it is based on consumption. So, in that case, it's very much like fashion as an exclusion; it has to keep moving to retain its cache. Because you will be copied, to keep the status, you have to move on as soon as other catch up.

Shonagh: Are there other signs and symbols associated with coolness, language, and body language, for example?

Vanessa: When people talk about others as cool, there is always an outward display, even in ‘under the radar’ forms. People enact that through clothing and objects. But also, as you say, there is a linguistic side to it, even the word cool, goes through phases of being uncool. Every successive generation has its word that means something a bit like cool. 

Another essential part is the bodily side, how composed you are literally, not metaphorically. How still are you? How relaxed are you? 

Another interesting way to think of it is as exclusive knowledge. I talked about coolness as a kind of spiritual dimension. For example, a shaman. That kind of coolness is derived from the impressiveness of somebody who knows something that everybody else doesn't know – access to higher knowledge. That can be manifested in everyday cultural scenarios like when you and your friends know about certain bands, can talk about them, and know what kind of music is affiliated with that scene. That gives you something that other people don't have. Cool people have tended to develop ways of making and keeping their tastes obscure for others. 

There is a brilliant book called Birth of The Cool: Beat, Bebop and the American Avant-Garde by Lewis MacAdams. In it, MacAdams talks about how the behaviors of jazz musicians in the 40s and 50s were derived from the fact that they were dealing with racism and came from their identity as Black men in America at that time. But also, a lot of them were heroin users, which was illegal, so they had to develop codes and ways of behaving that were undetectable to ‘the squares’. That's where cool language can develop - when you are trying to communicate and create your culture within a frowned-upon or illegal context. And so that's why that's another reason why coolness flourishes in scenarios where people are oppressed. Because it's a code for the group that enables them to keep going, but to others on the outside, it can function as a slightly disconcerting but hard to quantify form of insubordiance.

Shonagh: Do you think coolness can be global?

Vanessa: Cool is said to be increasingly a global phenomenon. In saying that, as already mentioned, cool has multiple nuances and histories, so it's not necessarily precisely the same phenomenon everywhere. But in the globalization of cool, there's something about the advances of consumer capitalism, the colonization by American culture historically, which has sold coolness as an ideal globally for many decades. 

Another great book is Joel Dinerstein's The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. His focus is on Black American culture, swing through to jazz. However, he also talks about Hollywood and the connections between the acting styles of white actors in Hollywood, who were in awe of Black cultural practitioners that they knew of; they aped their nonchalance and ‘downplayed’ demeanor. Nevertheless, it was packaged up and sold as white Americana throughout the globe. 

I think there is something about Hollywood fundamental to this idea of effortlessness. In film, all behaviors are well-practiced; you can rehearse – if you drop something, it can be filmed again, and you've been given the lines to practice, so your well-crafted, quick put-down comes across without any stumbling over the words. This idea of perfected behavior is inherent to the nature of filmmaking in the 20th century and has sold the concept of coolness in behavioral terms worldwide.  

There's also the fashion industry side of it and the idea of fashionability abandoning your traditional cultures and engaging with capitalism. That makes coolness a quotient of value, wherever those things touch.

It is interesting when people talk about fashion reshoring – the industry term for bringing production back onto your home territories and returning to forms of localism. That’s interesting because I would have said that coolness is something that emerges in cities. I think it is to some extent. But cool is yet to be understood as an internet phenomenon. There's work to do about that and how it might be changing in that context. But the sense that we are one little person trying to keep it together in the face of billions of anonymous others has only increased. 

Simmel, one of the sociologists, thinking about urban life in the late 19th century, and early 20th century, explored the impact of people being in a situation where you are compared with and facing interactions with those who don't know. He said that that might result in people becoming very anxious, or it could go the other way, and instead, they would become blasé. Blasé is a term used in the early decades of the 20th century to suggest this kind of coolness. You could think of a kind of arch Instagrammer as someone who's ‘got their shit together’; they're not worried about what everybody else is doing, even though behind the scenes, they're constantly checking, comparing, and needing to up their game. This performance of having it together is more important than ever.

Shonagh: I think coolness is sometimes associated with insecurity and lack of contentment. When I might have been considered cool at times in my life, I was at my unhappiest and meanest. As we are trying to have more awareness about mental health, there could be a case that smiling, being warm, authentic, flexible, and open are becoming cool. To smile is now cool. Do you think that it is moveable like that? Could it become cool to be nice and "happy"?

Vanessa: I wish I knew the answer to that myself. I'm erring on the side of yes. But I think the pathological side of coolness has always been more newsworthy. 

I also think about coolness in relation to composure. Sociologists Lyman and Scott, who wrote about coolness in the late 70s, spoke about poise and the idea of grace under pressure – rather than being somehow better than everybody else. I think there is the kernel of what is at the heart of even our pathological models of coolness, the idea that if we are sufficient, we are okay. The things other people are going to do are not going to wrong-foot us. That's what we want; I don't think we want to be better than other people. But I believe that we are offered a fashionable garment that nobody else has got- as a means of achieving that. We like cool role models in films and popular culture more broadly because we respond to them, even if we wouldn't do the things they do. After all, they exude that quality of unflappability. 

There are also forms of coolness that are politically engaged and heroic under pressure. I think that's the type of cool that we can aspire to whether we have a mass fast fashion system or not. How can you make that a possibility for more people? That is the big question. Many people engaged with sustainable fashion initiatives or alternative fashion futures are working on ways to chip away at that question. We all know it's multiple solutions rather than one. 

Some of the research I've been doing recently for a conference I am presenting is about the awkward relationship between coolness and fashion. I've been analyzing the work of Otto von Busch. He has written a book called the Pyschopolotics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion. He is also an educator and has created quite a lot of really interesting educational activities that are helping people to regain a sense of composure concerning the fashion system. 

Sometimes people who don't care about fashion can become social pariahs. That is obviously true, but there's also a cool that people who don't care about fashion can exude – it's just a different one. It might be that that person wears the same thing all the time. A lot of it is about how they wear it. I think it's interesting to think about how you orient yourself towards fashion. Are the cooler people the ones who are seemingly in tune with how fashion moves? That's the fashionable idea of cool: I've got all the right things at the right times for my group – maybe I'm even slightly ahead. But as I’ve suggested already, there's also a type of coolness, which is about being equal to fashion's challenge by saying, I see your challenge, and I don't care. I'm not running to catch up. The only place that isn't cool is visibly running to catch up, desperately hoping to but not quite managing. Because that's saying I am constantly under pressure that I can't live up to. Most of us probably feel like that because of the weight of fashion.  

In von Busch's book, he talks about the violence of fashion. He is a sustainable fashion activist, but his work is also focused on well-being; it's not only about resources but also the impact on human mental health. In one of his workshops, he gets people to make monuments to their silenced selves. He asks his students to bring a garment they feel they can't wear or don't wear but would like to wear. They create these totem-like sculptures out of them, and they have a discussion and do some writing. He asks them to bring themselves back to a place where they acknowledge the value of this garment, who it is inside them that wanted it and wants to wear it, and why are they being silenced?  

Von Busch talks about courage. I think his idea of courage is similar to the kind of cool I guess could liberate fashion. Maybe there is an element of education. Schools don't do anything to educate children effectively about fashion. They might not think it's essential. However, if people spend so many resources on it and so much mental energy on it, it feels like it is something that you should do something about. I had an idea for my son's school: why don't they teach them about these things while preparing for Halloween. They all need Halloween costumes, and every year they buy them in a supermarket, then throw them away – they're all plastic. They could make Halloween costumes, and while doing that, the children could learn about and understand their relationship with their clothes. Maybe different forms of education could help to chip away at that.

Shonagh: Thank you so much for talking to me. My last question is about your utopia. If you could wake up tomorrow in a changed world, what would that world look like?

Vanessa: I'm going to answer it from a personal point of view – that's the only way I can do it, and I mean the answer in the broader sense - I would like to see far less choice. I think one of the biggest problems is choice. One of the illusions of capitalism is the idea that choice is a good thing. It isn't; it holds us in suspended animation, wasting our time, worrying about insignificant decisions that make almost no difference to our lives. In terms of capitalism, and fashion, in particular, we have far too much choice, and we have far too much illusion of choice. Personally, I would also like that because when I'm happiest in clothes, I'm wearing something entirely practical. 

I went to an amazing talk where two people proposed a radical alternative to fashion with one garment: a jumpsuit. They had a jumpsuit for every size and shape, but they were all the same jumpsuit. You had to wear that all the time unless you were getting married. I think that was the one exception they mentioned, in which case you would wear the marriage jumpsuit, which is slightly different. It was funny, and provocative, but it resonated with me. When I go camping or do gardening, I often feel really free. 

I also find myself looking at pictures of indigenous cultures where their clothing is embroidered, beautiful, and ritualized. The clothing signifies the role you fulfill within your community. I often find myself fantasizing about wearing those sorts of things. So maybe my approach would not be entirely utilitarian, such as the jumpsuit example, but something more ritualized.

Shonagh: I often think about belonging to a group through my clothing. I experienced that when I was younger, but there is less association through music or subculture as you get older. 

Vanessa: You're forced into a situation where people group themselves around brands or certain kinds of looks, and belonging really isn't a good word to describe how people relate that way.

The tricky part of what I've just said is that traditional societies often don't allow for people not to fit into the mould of what they're expected to be. One of the benefits of urban life regarding people's differences is that it fosters eccentricity and more niche communities. The internet is doing the same on a much bigger scale. Being able to find ‘your people’ and dress like a mermaid unicorn or whatever it is. How will you find that if you feel that you don't fit in with the roles that your society has prescribed? We have to ask ourselves who will decide whether we wear a jumpsuit or not? Who decides what the jumpsuits are? What I've said is maybe a bit of an impossibility unless we face some post-apocalyptic scenario where we are just working with what we've got and creating new societies. 

That tension is inherent to the romantic ideal of the individual in fashion, something that we are all encouraged to aspire to. The thinking that I am a unique jewel,  and I must display that via the surface of my body. I often think - I'm not a unique jewel, and I don't need to display it to everybody. I'm just one little person in a human community. When alternative fashion futures and sustainable practices are pushing more towards better mental health in relation to fashion, I don't necessarily think the idea of encouraging people towards more self-expression is the right way. 

One of the things that I keep coming back to in my work with students, and my thinking, in my own life and thinking about appearance is images. We keep talking about empowering women through different ways of presenting ourselves, but why are we empowering ourselves through how we present ourselves? Why don't we empower ourselves by not presenting ourselves and just getting on with being something and doing something? That's an extensive set of questions that comes right back to how we engage with the earth. This idea about reconnecting with being and doing is fundamental to my fashion utopia.