There has been a run of forensic reports across the media on the death of cool.
There seems to be general agreement that the whole concept started to look unwell in the mid-sixties. An attack of the "commercialisations" threatened its health by damaging its integrity. Then, despite the desperate efforts of advertising executives to save it by injecting billions of dollars into its image, cool failed to recover from the shock.
In hindsight, the turning point in the influence of cool occurred when it lost its attachment to people and became something ascribed to objects, particularly gadgetry. Where once jazz genius Miles Davis, actors like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Marlon Brando defined cool, the term shifted to describing things as being cool. It is worth noting that the people regarded as cool never said they were cool - this was part of how the definition functioned. This disdain for the mundane was part of the attraction. Once the world of commerce realised the power of cool and started using it as an advertising hook, a tantalising bait to catch the customer, it became another angle to dangle. Selling the idea that the ownership of a thing would provide instant cool became the marketing nirvana and corporations went at with gusto. The difficulty was that cool was never actually for sale. Over time, the power of cool to sell stuff has dimmed but still companies persist in trying to tell us what is cool and what is not.
Writer Ted Gioia proposes that the instigator of cool in the media was the cartoon character Bugs Bunny with his nonchalant and rebellious, "What's up Doc". A generation of children laughed with Bugs and as teenagers adopted the pose so cool was born. This seems a little for fetched on first read but Gioia makes a good case for this childhood influence defining a social momentum in the fifties, along with jazz music and its creators. Then corporates discovered it and slowly killed cool by manipulating it to sell things. The original concept of cool has been recycled so many times as a marketing ploy that it has now lost any hint of the nonchalance and disdain that made it so attractive in the first place.
The hipster, an odd mix of skinny jeans, irony and sarcasm, is another trend that has already completed the cycle of fashion. In a relatively short space of time, it has gone from advertising darling to something regarded by the purchasing public as shallow and lacking in any depth. A 2008 article in Adbusters magazine asserts that, "the hipster represents the end of Western civilisation, a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new". That is perhaps a bit dramatic, but the hipsters are a subculture that has evolved under the watchful eye of corporate marketing, which has co-opted and used the hipster image to subvert the trend for commercial gain, creating little of substance in return.
