The Commodification of Cool

What is cool? Cool is a carefully curated ten-slide Instagram post: a Didion paperback and an iced Americano atop a wooden coffee table. Big sunglasses and wired headphones. Red nails and a glass of wine. Midi skirts and kitten heels and writing a Substack column like you’re Gen-Z Carrie Bradshaw. Cool is reading cool-girl books. Cool is taking up cool-girl hobbies. Cool is becoming “disgustingly educated”, if only to deliver bitesized chunks of knowledge in order to impress someone. Cool is kinda chic.

Coolness used to be an intangible quality, an energy that you felt as you passed someone on the street, knowing you’d never see them or capture that feeling again. Now, we seem to need influencers to tell us how to achieve it.

The Instagram reel commodification of cool has appeared under many different names. One most recent iteration of this is the term whimsy: “I’m whimsy-maxxing”... “how to be more whimsy”... “ten whimsy hobbies to try”.

Never mind that the incorrect usage of “whimsy” as an adjective seems to directly contrast with the notion of being “disgustingly educated”, the very concept of perfectly planning out a photograph to capture the whimsy of your day-to-day life inherently underwrites itself. If you were truly so whimsical that your days were chock-a-block with sewing and painting and doing puzzles, then surely it stands that there would not be enough time to post it on Instagram.

The same can be said for the recent “screen-free Sunday” trend, in which our intrepid influencers go an entire day without scrolling, but in doing so create yet another reel for the Instagram-addicted to scroll past and feel bad about. We all want the cool-girl validation of going analogue and sitting in the cafe with our crosswords rather than mindlessly thumbing through social media, but we simultaneously desire the validation that only social media can bring, as people waste their own Sundays commenting “love this!” or “great vibes” under your collage of slow mornings, brain food and touching grass.

Because everybody needs the Internet to show them how to live: I’m sure half of these people wouldn’t have considered putting the phone down before a girl in a matching set and a headband told them to. Why else are there so many videos with titles like “books to read to have disgustingly good taste” or “podcasts to listen to to become disgustingly well-educated”? Nobody wants to mess around and figure things out for themselves anymore. I mean, why read 5 mediocre books before discovering an author you really love, when the algorithm can just optimize a cool-girl TBR for you? Why go the shop and sample a range of scents, when you could just pick up the “cool girl scent for autumn” and have it be done with?

It’s been said to death, but coolness is a matter of personal taste, of developing your own interests and acting because you want to act. But even the act of having your own taste has been  commodified these days, with videos such as “documenting my style without Pinterest” being uploaded. As the digital surveyance and archiving of our lives spirals out of control, so too does the idea of actually “being cool” become an ever-distant memory. Because to be cool/chic/glam/elegant, or whichever buzzword is currently splayed in pastel text across our screens, requires a level of effortlessness — an effortlessness that simply cannot exist in the digital age of performance. Coolness now is simply an approximation; a replication of a replication of a replication. We have become alienated from the self as we mold ourselves into digital commodities for the consumption of others. As such, real “coolness” remains just out of reach.