Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Joel Dinerstein
On Defining Cool, Tracking It Across the Eras and Building From What Is True Now
Cool is the most misread word in business. Most people hear it and think of trends, aesthetics or whatever is in right now. That reading is shallow. Cool is the truth of an era, expressed with more force than anything else around it. It changes form every generation because the truth of every generation changes. Seeing what is true now, and building in response to it, is the work of the modern leader.
Coolnomics defines cool in one line.
Each of the four superlatives does its own work.
Read shallow, cool is trends, aesthetics and surface style. Read properly, cool sits on top of everything a society is working through: taste, aspiration, social and cultural capital, power, politics, exclusion, exploitation and colonisation. Cool is not shallow. It never was.
Two things follow from the definition, and both matter for anyone building a business.
First, cool is not a fixed look. Every era has its own, because every era has its own truth. The leather jacket, the Walkman, the logo tee and the lime-green album cover were each the most concentrated expression of a particular moment. None of them transfers cleanly to the next one.
Second, cool is not a moral category. It is not the same thing as good. It is the same thing as true. That is why cool can be ugly. It is also why an era's cool can look shameful twenty years later. The cool was accurate. The era was the problem.
Two thinkers carry this definition. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel explains what the Zeitgeist is. Joel Dinerstein explains how it shows up as cool.
Working Paper 001 set out the Zeitgeist through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Zeit, time; Geist, spirit. The collective consciousness of an era in motion. The beliefs, questions and anxieties a society holds at once, often without knowing it holds them.
In October 1806, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched Napoleon ride through Jena on the eve of battle. In a letter to his friend Friedrich Niethammer he called the Emperor "this world-soul". The spirit of an entire age, visible in one man on a horse. That is the move cool makes. It takes something a whole society feels and cannot yet say, and gives it a body.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also read history as having a direction.
"The History of the World is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837)
Freedom, in that sentence, is about who counts. Who gets to be seen, to speak and to author their own meaning. Every era's cool is a record of how far that consciousness has travelled. Read cool across the centuries and you are reading who was allowed in.
The movement happens through contradiction. An era develops a tension it can no longer contain. The old form breaks. What was true in it gets carried into the new form, and what was false gets left behind. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called this Aufhebung. It is the clearest account we have of how cool changes.
Joel Dinerstein is a cultural historian at Tulane University. He wrote the first history of the concept, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, and co-curated American Cool at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in 2014. His work gives the Zeitgeist a face, a date and an address.
His history starts in Black American jazz. The saxophonist Lester Young created and spread the modern use of the word in the early 1940s. The idea underneath it is older. Dinerstein draws on the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, who traced an aesthetic of the cool through West African cultures: composure, balance, a mask of calm held under pressure. In postwar America that mask became a strategy for keeping your dignity in a society built to deny it.
"To be cool was to project a calm defiance."
Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017)
For the exhibition, Dinerstein and his co-curator Frank H. Goodyear III built a rubric. A figure had to carry at least three of four qualities: an original artistic vision with a signature style, rebellion or transgression in a given historical moment, iconic recognition and a lasting legacy. The exhibition described its subject as the Zeitgeist taking embodied form. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have recognised the idea.
Three more of Dinerstein's findings carry straight into Coolnomics. Cool is generational: each generation answers a different call. Cool travels through a sequence of transgression, imitation, admiration and emulation, and cultural rebellion tends to arrive before social change. And cool is not virtue. Dinerstein is explicit that cool is not the same thing as being nice or good.
He also names the thing Coolnomics measures. Cool is about reception as much as perception. A figure is cool because a generation recognises itself in them. In Coolnomics we call that recognition resonance.
In the Coolnomics 101 lectures we read cool and the economy on one timeline, across five eras. The word for cool changes with each one. The mechanism doesn't. In every era, cool is whatever carried the truth of the time with the most force.
| Era | Dates | What cool looked like | Cool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Agriculture | Prehistory to 10,000 BCE | Cave paintings, oral tradition, song and ritual. The stories a people chose to remember carried the truth of their time. | Story |
| Agriculture | 10,000 BCE to 500 CE | Socrates, Aristotle and Roman law. Surplus arrives, and with it the first systems for judging what an idea is worth. | Wisdom |
| Reason & Romanticism | 1400 to 1850 | Michelangelo, Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Centuries spent asking what is real, what is felt and what is worth believing. | Consciousness |
| Modern / Postmodern | 1900 to 2000 | Lester Young names cool. Black culture mined for white commercial gain. Elvis, punk, hip hop and Nirvana. The cycle speeds up. | Rebellion |
| Now | 2000 to Present | Old systems and old versions of truth dismantled in public. Utility, intuition and directness over polish and performance. | Truth |
The modern era is where the word was born and where it was fought over hardest. It is also the era most of us grew up inside. It deserves a closer read.
Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. Cool began as composure under a racism that denied Black artists their dignity on and off the stage. The blank face, the low voice and the refusal to perform gratitude were political acts. Cool was a way of standing.
Then it crossed over. Elvis Presley learned his voice and stagecraft from Black singers in Memphis. Dinerstein recounts that when a local DJ first played his record, listeners phoned in to ask whether the singer was white or Black. What they were really asking was whether they were allowed to like it. Brando, Dean and Kerouac followed. The style travelled fast. The politics travelled slower, and often not at all. That gap between the aesthetic and the truth underneath it would define the next half-century.
By the 1980s cool had a home: the mall, the network and the high school movie. The jock pushed the nerd into the locker. The girl was the prize. The thin, white, wealthy kid was the default everyone else was measured against. MTV launched in 1981 and played almost no Black artists until Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" broke through in 1983. Hip hop went from the Bronx to the top of the charts, and most of the companies that profited on the way up were not owned by the people who made it.
The nineties and two-thousands sharpened the pattern. Heroin chic. Size zero. Tabloids stalking young women for sport. The Victoria's Secret show on network television. Then Abercrombie & Fitch, whose CEO Mike Jeffries told Salon in 2006 that the brand went after the cool kids and that a lot of people didn't belong in its clothes.
"Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."
Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, to Salon (2006)
It worked. For a decade it worked extremely well. That is the uncomfortable part, and the Coolnomics definition doesn't flinch from it. This was cool. It was the Zeitgeist of its time at its most distinct and potent. The time was patriarchal, exclusionary and built on borrowed Black style, so its cool was too. Dinerstein notes how rarely women were even given the word: plenty of magazines crowned a Mr Cool, almost none a Ms Cool.
Then the twist. By the 2010s the nerd had won. He built the platforms, took the money and in plenty of cases became the jock. Different uniform. Same locker. The gate hadn't moved. Only the person holding the key had changed.
Pierre Bourdieu showed that taste keeps its authority only while it looks natural, as if it was inherited rather than built. The cool of this era looked natural. It was ownership dressed up as taste.
2016 broke the consensus in public. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump exposed contradictions the old order could no longer hold, and the years that followed forced them into the open. In October 2017 #MeToo went global, carrying a movement Tarana Burke had started a decade earlier. Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013, became one of the largest protest movements in American history after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The people who had been pushed into the lockers now had platforms, audiences and the power to name what had happened to them.
The economy read it fast. Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with forty foundation shades and the rest of the industry scrambled to catch up. Savage X Fenty put every kind of body on a lingerie runway the following year. The Victoria's Secret show was cancelled in 2019. Mike Jeffries had left Abercrombie in 2014, and the brand rebuilt itself around the opposite idea before returning to record sales. The same word that built it had nearly buried it.
Masculinity softened in public. Harry Styles wore a gown on the cover of Vogue in 2020. Rihanna headlined the Super Bowl pregnant, in Loewe, with Parris Goebel choreography. That's cool, and everyone in the room knew it.
It is not cool to be a bully now. It is not cool to be exclusionary. Bullying was always wrong, so morality isn't the reason. It lost its cool because it stopped being true to the moment. It reads as the last era's form. This is Aufhebung in real time: cool kept the composure, the signature and the defiance it was born with, and dropped the gate.
The old form hasn't disappeared. Grievance politics, the manosphere and exclusion as a brand strategy are loud, and they have money behind them. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would expect nothing less. Every new form arrives with the old one pushing back, and the Zeitgeist of 2026 holds both. That isn't a flaw in the definition. It is the definition working, and Part Six comes back to it.
Cool can be cheap. Silly. Even ugly. What it can never be is false.
"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton built one of the great commercial arcs in modern music on a look the tasteful world laughed at. The wigs, the nails and the rhinestones were never a disguise. They were exactly who she said she was. She never changed. The culture came to her.
Crocs spent years as the internet's favourite punchline for the ugliest shoe ever made. In 2017 Balenciaga put them on a platform sole and sent them down the runway in Paris. Crocs, Inc. reported record revenue of US$4.1 billion for 2024. The shoe didn't get prettier. The moment caught up with what it was: comfortable, honest and in on the joke.
In 2024 Charli XCX released Brat with a lime-green cover and a blurry typeface that looked like a mistake. It named a summer. It was messy and unpolished and completely true to a generation worn out by the curated feed. Nirvana did the same thing to the gloss of the eighties in 1991.
Now the opposite case. In 2017 Pepsi released an ad in which Kendall Jenner hands a police officer a can of soft drink at a protest, and the tension dissolves. It borrowed the look of a real movement and none of its truth. Pepsi pulled it within a day. Pretty, polished and false.
Cool on its own doesn't pay. Plenty of true ideas never touch the economy. A Coolnomics moment needs three things to line up.
Miss the first and you have a costume. Miss the second and you are early or late. Miss the third and you have a moment the economy never touches. The cases below are deliberately uneven. Some are beautiful. Some are ugly. Some you will admire and some you won't. Each one is a truth meeting a truth, with a vehicle built around it.
Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 with the company close to broke. The truth in his idea was that technology should be beautiful, simple and personal, made where engineering meets the humanities. The truth of the Zeitgeist was that the computer was leaving the office and moving into people's homes, pockets and identities. "Think Different" named it. The vehicles carried it: the iMac in 1998, the iPod and the first Apple Stores in 2001, the iTunes Store in 2003 and the iPhone in 2007. In that era, Steve Jobs represented what was true. By 2011 Apple was the most valuable company in the world.
In 2016 Donald Trump represented what was true for a large share of American voters. Many felt their wages had stalled, their towns had been left behind and the people running the country weren't listening. The truth in his idea was the outsider who would say what the establishment wouldn't. The vehicle was already built: more than a decade of The Apprentice as a national brand, rallies run like shows, a Twitter feed that went around the press and a red hat that turned a slogan into merch. Plenty of people found it ugly. Many still do. It was true for enough voters to win, and it has shaped politics ever since. You don't have to like a truth for it to be true.
Dolly Parton is another version again. Her truth never changed: a girl from a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, who knew exactly what she was selling and said so out loud. The Zeitgeist moved around her. The tasteful world started out laughing and ended up claiming her, across almost every line that divides American life. The vehicle grew at every stage: the songs, Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You", Dollywood, her own label and the Imagination Library. Some truths meet the moment once. Dolly's met it again and again, because every era found something in it that was true for them.
Zohran Mamdani entered the 2025 New York mayoral race polling around one percent. The truth in his idea was a democratic socialist platform built around one question: can ordinary people afford to live here? That was also the truth of the city. The vehicle was short-form video in the register of the people he was talking to, carrying concrete promises: free buses, a rent freeze and city-run grocery stores. Two truths met, and the vehicle carried them to City Hall.
Adam Sullivan is a Gold Coast personal trainer who built an audience in the hundreds of thousands as Evidence Based Training. The truth in his idea is fitness advice grounded in evidence and delivered like a mate at the pub: crude, funny and free of the wellness gloss. He calls his audience cunnies, a piece of Aussie vernacular that makes some people wince. The truth of the Zeitgeist is a public tired of polished influencers selling miracle powders, and a generation that wants science it can trust in a voice it recognises. Creatine, one of the most researched supplements there is, has moved off the bodybuilding shelf and into the mainstream. The vehicle is Cunnies Gummies: creatine gummies sold as evidence-backed and third-party tested, alongside EVDNCE activewear and free community events. The name is ugly. The product is sound. The audience is in on the joke. That's a Coolnomics moment.
The Zeitgeist rarely holds a single truth. 2016 produced Donald Trump, and within a year it produced #MeToo. Both were true. Both carried enormous numbers of people. They pointed in opposite directions. This is the contradiction Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw moving history: an era holding truths it can't yet reconcile, pushing toward a resolution it hasn't reached.
For a business, the question isn't which truth is right. It is which truth your idea actually carries, and whether that truth is strong enough in this moment to carry a business with it.
The word for this era is truth. Old systems and old versions of truth are being dismantled in public. Institutional trust is low. AI now sits between the idea and the market, and anything can be produced. The middle of the economy has dropped out: there is still money moving there, just less of it, and it is pickier than it has ever been. Ethics has moved from optional to structural.
In that economy, cool does three jobs at once.
Depth without aesthetics stays niche. Aesthetics without utility stays a trend. All three, and it compounds.
Zohran Mamdani is the political case. The depth he never softened. A campaign aesthetic unlike anything else on the ballot. Then, once in office, the unglamorous utility of budgets and potholes. That last part is what turns a moment into a mandate.
LORE is the clearest commercial case. Every scent is built around a story, not just a smell. The bottles could sit next to Tom Ford or Chanel. The perfumer, Jérôme Epinette, is the nose behind Byredo and Sol de Janeiro. The price is $88 instead of $200-plus. Depth, aesthetics and utility, sold straight into the picky middle.
Read the era as a list and it looks like this. Truth. Directness. Utility. Inclusion as a default, not a campaign. Softness without apology. Ethics built into the structure rather than bolted on. That's cool now.
The Zeitgeist is easiest to read in hindsight. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said as much about philosophy itself.
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)
Understanding arrives once an era is ending. A leader doesn't get to wait for dusk. These four currents are visible now and not yet settled. Each one answers something true about this moment.
| Current | Answers | Where you see it | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proof of Hand | An economy flooded with generated content | Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year. Brands now sell "human-made" as a premium, and makers show their process as part of the product. When anything can be generated, the human decision becomes the scarce thing. | Rising |
| Taste at a Fair Price | A middle that has dropped out | People still want beauty. They won't pay a logo tax for it. LORE at $88. Craft and design that respects the buyer's budget without talking down to their taste. | Arrived |
| Local and Accountable | Institutional trust at a low | Politics you can meet in the pub. Businesses where you can see who made it and who answers for it. Scale is no longer the proof of trust. Proximity is. | Rising |
| Joy as a Position | A public life run on anger | Freedom and joy set deliberately against grievance. Warmth that is watchable and shareable because nobody forwards an argument. They forward a feeling. | Emerging |
None of these is a trend to chase. Each one is a truth to build from. The businesses that meet them early will look like they got lucky. They won't have.
If cool is what is true, then reading cool is a leadership skill. It isn't a marketing one.
The modern leader's job is to see what is true in society, in the economy and in politics, and to create in response to it. Most businesses run this backwards. They pick a look, launch it and hope the moment matches. Occasionally it does. Mostly it doesn't, and they call it bad luck.
Syncing to the Zeitgeist takes three moves.
See it. Look at what is actually true for the people you serve, including what you would rather not see. Their money, their politics, their exhaustion, their anger and their joy. The truth of the moment is rarely comfortable, and it is never neutral.
Say it. Name the true thing plainly, before anyone else does. The idea that says out loud what people already feel doesn't need to convince them. It confirms them.
Build it. Put a commercial vehicle around the meeting of the two truths. Give it depth to stand on, aesthetics to carry it and utility to keep it turning.
That is where the flywheel lives. When truth anchors an idea, every turn compounds. The product proves the story. The story brings the people. The people bring the money. The money funds a truer version of the product. The business stops pushing and starts being pulled.
When a business builds from what is true, it stops chasing cool and starts producing it. The market stops being a crowd to convince and becomes a room of people who recognise themselves in what you made. That is where the potency is, and it is why these businesses feel alive.
There are two ways to miss. The first is borrowing the aesthetic of the moment without its truth, as Pepsi did. The second is loyalty to the last era's cool after its truth has gone, as Abercrombie did under Jeffries and Victoria's Secret did until the show was cancelled. Both are the same mistake. Both mistake the look for the thing.
The fastest way to become uncool is to keep performing the last era's truth.
This is also where the Coolnomics Score begins. Its first principle, Relevance, asks whether the world is ready for an idea now. Read against this paper, the question gets sharper. Is it true, now?
Cool has been story, wisdom, consciousness and rebellion. Now it is truth. It has been beautiful and ugly, liberating and cruel. It has handed power to the excluded and it has been the tool that excluded them. Through all of it, cool has done one thing consistently. It has told the truth of its time with more force than anything else around it.
That makes cool the most useful signal a leader has. It isn't a verdict on taste. It is a reading of reality.
In reverence to reality.
This paper draws on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of history: the Zeitgeist as collective consciousness in motion, history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom and Aufhebung as the way one form gives way to the next. Its history of cool comes from Joel Dinerstein, who wrote the first history of the concept and built the rubric behind American Cool. Dinerstein's account of cool's West African roots draws on Robert Farris Thompson. Its reading of taste as a gate comes from Pierre Bourdieu. Coolnomics synthesises these into a practice: a working definition of cool, and a way of building from it commercially.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Denizet-Lewis, Benoit (2006) 'The Man Behind Abercrombie & Fitch'. Salon, 24 January.
Dinerstein, Joel (2014) 'American Cool: A Theory of Cool'. In Dinerstein, Joel and Goodyear, Frank H. III, American Cool. Munich: Prestel, with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Dinerstein, Joel (2017) The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1806) Letter to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, 13 October. In Hegel: The Letters, trans. C. Butler and C. Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1820) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Preface.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1837) Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857. Introduction.
Merriam-Webster (2025) 'Word of the Year 2025: Slop'.
Thompson, Robert Farris (1973) 'An Aesthetic of the Cool'. African Arts, 7(1).
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