Campus Cool: What makes you cool?

The pilot article of the Campus Cool series explores the definition of “cool” and how it changes with age, place and time.

Photography: Cerys Mason

What makes you cool? The dreaded question. One that has haunted our student careers from the very beginning and defined not only our friendship groups, but how we view our whole identity. The word itself never changes, but its meaning evolves with each stage in history, and within that, each stage of our individual lives. At 11 years old, “Twilight” was the epitome of cool, with its broody and overly eroticised view on teenage life that some of us desperately wanted to be a part of. When we wanted to up the ante a few years later, the chaos of “Skins” became the new cool dream. Now, as university students, cool looks more like the raw world of “Normal People”, which is perhaps the closest to our own. The same goes for all aspects of social life: from Uggs, to flannel shirts, to baggy jeans; from Facebook, to Instagram, to Tik Tok. Our world is constantly updating.

Inspired first and foremost by the American Cool exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, I began researching the social origins of the concept of cool. Unsurprisingly, the meaning as we know it now takes from African American Vernacular English, heavily present in Black jazz music in the 20th century. Before this, though, you’ll notice how the actual meaning of “cool” – low in temperature – has been used as a metaphor for a laissez-faire attitude and relaxed temperament in literature and in dialogue globally. According to the National Endowment for Humanities feature article “How did Cool become such a big deal?” it was that the very controversy of Black jazz culture at the time that amplified cool to much more than just a word. In that sense, this is where the cool we know today, as well as an entire vocabulary of modern slang, was born.

Billie Holiday

Sitting in a Caffè Nero on a rainy afternoon in London, drying out my soaking tote bag that I had brought in a weak attempt to look hipster, I realised that my version of cool was very different to that of icons such as Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley and James Dean from the American Cool exhibition. Suddenly, thinking that a diet of coffee, cigarettes and four-pound wine will sustain my coolness did not seem enough.

But then, cool has a million different dimensions. Cool is sustainable living and fashion; it is technology, clubbing culture and political activism. Thus, in those moments of existential dread that I will never achieve true coolness, which turned into a curiosity for the concept itself, Campus Cool took form. Because in reality, as we begin our adult life, cool will not be as simple as “Twilight” or “Skins” or “Normal People”. Now that the terrifying ultimatum of stereotypes has evaporated in the midst of our school selves, university-cool emerges, which can mean anything and everything.

It can also mean anywhere. As students in London, our understanding of what the latest trends are is entirely different not only to other countries around the world, but also to other universities in the UK. London-cool has a particular face and personality, one that thrives on stupidly priced rent and pints, but also on youth and cosmopolitan freedom. It is the heart of British culture, with a perfect myriad of ethnicities, ages, sexualities and identities that stretch the possibilities of cool into the stratosphere and impact our own meaning of it. From trendy rooftop bars to bustling street markets to the latest art exhibitions, London culture refreshes itself much faster than anywhere else, and with that, our student-cool culture does too.

Photography: Cerys Mason

I hope that my blatant adoration for this city has not become too much of a factor here, but I really am fascinated by the exciting and modern nature of campus-cool. Universities often seem to be paving entirely new routes of cool, by pushing real-world issues of sustainability and politics into the limelight and providing them the attention that they deserve. Cool is not always an superficial trend or a new social media platform - it gives young people a voice. Take the Black jazz culture of the 1920s – yes, it blessed us with some of the best music to ever be produced, but it also sparked a revolution. Cool has the power to do many things, and as university students, so do we. I may merely be a second-year UCL student who still for the life of me can’t figure out how Blackboard Collaborate works; but of this I am sure.

This article is published as part of the Campus Cool series, written by Pi Media columnist Cerys Mason.