Cool originally meant personal authority stylized as stoic nonconformity, not detached style

Evidence

Yet Vice remained a Gen X operation attempting to speak for a millennial audience. By the 2010s, millennials were old enough to tell their own stories—and they no longer gravitated toward the cynical detachment that long defined earlier notions of “cool.” As scholar Joel Dinerstein writes in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, the aesthetic disposition “cool” was at first “synonymous with authenticity, independence, integrity, and nonconformity; to be cool meant you carried personal authority through a stylish mask of stoicism.” This required wearing a “mask of cool” to project “toughness and self-mastery.” Sixties suburban teenagers dulled down coolness into a mere signifier of style or novelty purchased in the marketplace. Yet even in the 1990s, vestiges of the original definition remained: a standoffishness, an oppositional attitude toward conformity, and an aversion to indulging in schmaltzy emotions. Early 2000s downtown artists like Dash Snow and the Strokes felt a need to mask their privilege under layers of performative grime and disaffection. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier reading on self-presentation and generational taste shifts; also links to the ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism Marx is building toward.
• QUESTION: The genealogy of ‘cool’ from postwar stoic authenticity to marketable style is worth tracing further — when exactly did the definition flip, and was the mask always already performance?