Cool originally meant stoic authenticity and nonconformity, then degraded into 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. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated goal: Marx’s lineage of cool across generations supports the four-period structure and the eventual flattening into omnivore monoculture.
• DEFINE: Defines the original meaning of ‘cool’ before it became a marketable signifier.