What is Cool

Irony is already a hallmark of Gen Z’s cultural expression and a coping mechanism honed in the hyper-visibility of the internet. When you’ve grown up always aware that anything you post could become part of a permanent digital footprint, doing something “ironically” offers a kind of social insurance. If it lands poorly, you were never serious. If... See more

1. Sincerity: It’s 2008 and you beg your mom to take you to the mall so you can buy skinny jeans. Your family makes fun of your too-tight jeans.


2. Saturation: It’s 2016 and your entire friend groups shows up to the pre game in some variation of high-waisted skinny jeans and a crop top.


3. Cringe: It’s 2020 and anyone who still shows up in a skinny jean

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Then, out of the blue this year, “5 Years Time” made a comeback as the soundtrack to a climactic moment in the new “Superman.” The seventeen-year-old mandolin-and-violin tune that millennials played with anticipatory nostalgia during college is now accompanying social-media video clips about the DC Universe, its cringe wholly recuperated as... See more

Millennial commenters express a desire to rewind to that era of their lives; younger posters wish that they could have lived through it in the first place. Like “Home,” these other relics hark back to an unencumbered life outside of our performative digital panopticon. As a bit of internet-vernacular wisdom puts it, “I am cringe but I am free.”

Hailey and her team took a page out of the well-trodden Trippin’ with Tarte-style brand trip playbook: create desire by limiting access. That strategy worked in the boom times of the last decade, but in our current era of economic anxiety and wealth inequality, it’s giving young people, to quote one Reddit commenter, “the absolute ick.”

What makes someone cool? People like David Bowie, Samuel L. Jackson and Charli XCX may seem to have little in common, but a study came up with six shared traits: Cool people are perceived to be extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.