The collapse of cool

Reflecting on the origins of cool, which in my mind, was born at the intersection of artistic expression and political resistance, makes it painfully clear that we’ve lost the entire plot.

Thew away the screenplay.

Tore up the script.

And exited the damn stage.

Cool was once a posture of quiet rebellion, a mix of self-possession and refusal.

Coming from the margins, cool has always been political: jazz musicians refusing to flinch under pressure, punks refusing to play nice, hip-hop turning pain into steeze. It wasn’t a look; it was an attitude.

But in the age of the algorithm, rebellion has been replaced by replication.

Every aesthetic, every microtrend, every ironic in-joke is instantly discoverable, remixable, and infinitely reproducible. What used to signal insider knowledge or defiant individuality now signals nothing at all… because everyone saw it on their For You Page yesterday.

It’s easy to blame capitalism and marketing for killing cool (and we should, partially). But the real betrayal is ours. We wanted the effect of cool without the effort: the vibe without the values, the detachment without the defiance.

Irony killed cool.

Historically, cool meant restraint. A calm refusal to conform. A nod to those who got it. It was about sovereignty.

Now, cool has, in some ways, been redefined by irony. Online, irony is currency, and its most valuable form is chaos. What began as subversive humour has devolved into a culture of chaos; memes, ragebait, contrarianism, absurdity. Irony was once a tool of critique; now it’s an aesthetic strategy.

And brands, naturally, adapted.

Balenciaga’s $1,790 “trash bag” isn’t merely satire but a pre-emptive strike against critique, a product that bakes its own mockery into the price tag. The irony is the product.

When everything’s self-aware, nothing’s sincere and it’s deeply unserious.

The same posture that once protected art from commercialisation has become the thing that enables it. Ironic detachment has replaced genuine dissent, and we’ve all become complicit in consuming cool’s hollow shell.

Some say we’re entering a new era of earnestness, that caring is cool again (aaaaw.)

The Dazed “State of Youth” report insists that Gen Z’s version of cool is about “authenticity, alignment, and intention.” Kyle Chayka wondered in The New Yorker if “millennial sincerity is tiptoeing back into fashion.”

And sure, that sounds nice. But sincerity has already been commodified too. The “purpose-led” brand playbook, the “authentic creator economy,” the “I actually love this product” TikTok trend. All of it runs through the same commercial pipeline.

The sincerity cycle can’t save us, because the cycle itself is the problem.

Cool used to evolve dialectically: counterculture reacting to culture, sincerity following irony, rebellion following conformity. But now, everything happens at once. Every countermove is instantly monetised. Every rebellion has a merch drop. Every cultural swing is a brand strategy deck waiting to happen.

The pendulum hasn’t just sped up—it’s collapsed.

The internet didn’t democratise culture so much as it flattened it.

When every niche is immediately accessible, when taste can be optimised for engagement, subculture stops being sub-anything.

Cool once relied on context, like who you were, where you found it, how early you knew. But in the attention economy, context is irrelevant.

The irony is that the same systems that made it easier to discover what’s cool also made it impossible for anything to stay cool. The second something trends, it’s already over. What was once a whisper between insiders is now a loudspeaker for the masses.

As a result, cool has become a set of aesthetic gestures divorced from meaning.

It's a palette of references without rebellion, irony without intent, “vibes” without values.

So, what’s left after cool?

If irony has lost its bite, and sincerity its meaning, maybe the next iteration of cool won’t look like either. Maybe it’s opacity, things that resist explanation, optimisation, or commodification. Maybe it’s care that isn’t public, taste that isn’t shared, belonging that isn’t broadcast.

For marketers, that means rethinking what cultural participation even looks like.

Instead of chasing the next cool aesthetic, maybe the real opportunity lies in creating space for subculture to regenerate, not harvesting it the second it freaking emerges.

That could mean:

• Designing for depth, not reach. Build smaller, weirder communities where people can actually experiment without the algorithm flattening them.

• Leaving things unexplained. Stop translating everything into brand language; mystery invites meaning.

• Investing in patience. Cool used to require time, to gestate, to spread, to be discovered. Let it.

Because if everything is visible, nothing feels vital.

And maybe, just maybe, the only way to make something feel cool again is to make it a little harder to find. Go figure.

-Sophie Randell, Writer