Cool Hunting

"Coolhunting is not about the articulation of a coherent philosophy of cool. It's just a collection of spontaneous observations and predictions that differ from one moment to the next and from one coolhunter to the next."

For this reason, among others, cool hunting isn't all that reliable. Clearly, cool isn't the same to everyone, everywhere. While there are magazines and websites for alternative rock, there's the same for hip-hop, for pop music, for country. With these come different styles and products. Baysie was looking for a different "cool" with Converse than with Reebok. The kids in the shoe store in New York where she realized she should move one sneaker to the boys' section could careless what type of shoe Kurt Cobain was wearing when he died. Location determines cool, too. As DeeDee said that Texas is behind New York in "cool," she would probably say that the kids in the village where I'm from are even behind the nearby cities, but it seems to me that Texas should have a different idea of cool from New York and villages from cities.

One good observation that Gladwell made was the paradox that as the cool hunter's find cool, it changes. As band's become mainstream, many people who never heard of them think they're a cool new band while many of their original fans turn their backs for selling out. Before Twilight made it big, the kids who read vampire novels like Ann Rice's were considered "goth" and mocked by the "cool" kids. The popular social networking sites have changed with time, from Myspace, to Facebook, to Twitter. Soon people will be updating on a new site and leave their Facebooks to be forgotten as they have their Myspace accounts. Cool hunters will pick up on this, followed by advertisers, news and radio stations, and then the cool will move on once again.