By Malcolm Gladwell
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from The New Yorker March 17, 1997 ANNALS OF STYLE The Coolhunt Who decides what's cool? Certain kids in certain places-- and only the coolhunters know who they are. by Malcolm Gladwell 1. had decided they didn't want shower sandals. DeeDee the hundred-and-twenty- five- recalls, "I'm like, 'I'm telling Baysie Wightman met dollar basketball sneaker with you, Baysie, this is going to DeeDee Gordon, seventeen different kinds of hit. There are just too many appropriately enough, on a high-technology materials and people wearing it. We have coolhunt. It was 1992. colors and air-cushioned heels to make a shower sandal.' " Baysie was a big shot for anymore. They wanted So Baysie, DeeDee, and a Converse, and DeeDee, who simplicity and authenticity, designer came up with the was barely twenty-one, was and Baysie picked up on that. idea of making a retro running a very cool boutique She brought back the sneaker-sandal, cutting the called Placid Planet, on Converse One Star, which was back off the One Star and Newbury Street in Boston. a vulcanized, suède, low-top putting a thick outsole on it. Baysie came in with a classic old-school sneaker It was huge, and, amazingly, camera crew-one she often from the nineteen-seventies, it's still huge. used when she was and, sure enough, the One coolhunting-and said, "I've Star quickly became the Today, Baysie works for been watching your store, signature shoe of the retro Reebok as general- I've seen you, I've heard you era. Remember what Kurt merchandise manager-part know what's up," because it Cobain was wearing in the of the team trying to return was Baysie's job at Converse famous picture of him lying Reebok to the position it to find people who knew dead on the ground after enjoyed in the mid- what was up and she committing suicide? Black nineteen-eighties as the thought DeeDee was one of Converse One Stars. DeeDee's country's hottest sneaker those people. DeeDee says big score was calling the company. DeeDee works for that she responded with sandal craze. She had been an advertising agency in Del reserve-that "I was like, out in Los Angeles and had Mar called Lambesis, where 'Whatever' "-but Baysie said kept seeing the white teen-age she puts out a quarterly tip that if DeeDee ever wanted girls dressing up like cholos, sheet called the L Report on to come and work at Mexican gangsters, in tight what the cool kids in major Converse she should just white tank tops known as American cities are thinking call, and nine months later "wife beaters," with a bra and doing and buying. DeeDee called. This was strap hanging out, and long Baysie and DeeDee are best about the time the cool kids shorts and tube socks and friends. They talk on the phone all the time. They get cutting edge, the more elusive lack of a better word, really together whenever Baysie is the cutting edge becomes. cool. She doesn't do the teen in L.A. (DeeDee: "It's, like, This is the first rule of the thing of climbing half an how many times can you cool: The quicker the chase, octave at the end of every drive past O. J. Simpson's the quicker the flight. The act sentence. Instead, she drags house?"), and between them of discovering what's cool is out her vowels for emphasis, they can talk for hours about what causes cool to move on, so that if she mildly the art of the coolhunt. which explains the disagreed with something They're the Lewis and Clark triumphant circularity of I'd said she would say of cool. coolhunting: because we have "Maalcolm" and if she coolhunters like DeeDee and strongly disagreed with what What they have is what Baysie, cool changes more I'd said she would say everybody seems to want quickly, and because cool "Maaalcolm." these days, which is a changes more quickly, we window on the world of the need coolhunters like DeeDee Baysie is older, just past street. Once, when fashion and Baysie. forty (although you would trends were set by the big never guess that), and went couture houses-when cool DeeDee is tall and glamorous, to Exeter and Middlebury was trickle- down-that with short hair she has dyed and had two grandfathers wasn't important. But so often that she claims to who went to Harvard sometime in the past few have forgotten her real color. (although you wouldn't decades things got turned She drives a yellow 1977 Trans guess that, either). She has over, and fashion became Am with a burgundy stripe curly brown hair and big trickle-up. It's now about down the center and a 1973 green eyes and long legs and chase and flight-designers Mercedes 450 SL, and lives in so much energy that it is and retailers and the mass a spare, Japanese-style cabin hard to imagine her asleep, consumer giving chase to in Laurel Canyon. She uses or resting, or even standing the elusive prey of street words like "rad" and "totally," still for longer than thirty cool-and the rise of and offers non-stop, deadpan seconds. The hunt for cool is coolhunting as a profession pronouncements on pop an obsession with her, and shows how serious the chase culture, as in "It's all about DeeDee is the same way. has become. The sneakers of Pee-wee Herman." She DeeDee used to sit on the Nike and Reebok used to sounds at first like a teen, like corner of West Broadway come out yearly. Now a new the same teens who, at and Prince in SoHo-back style comes out every Lambesis, it is her job to when SoHo was cool-and season. Apparel designers follow. But teen speech- take pictures of everyone used to have an eighteen- particularly girl-teen speech, who walked by for an entire month lead time between with its fixation on reported hour. Baysie can tell you concept and sale. Now speech ("so she goes," "and precisely where she goes on they're reducing that to a I'm like," "and he goes") and her Reebok coolhunts to year, or even six months, in its stock vocabulary of find the really cool order to react faster to new accompanying grimaces and alternative white kids ("I'd ideas from the street. The gestures-is about using maybe go to Portland and paradox, of course, is that language less to communicate hang out where the the better coolhunters than to fit in. DeeDee uses skateboarders hang out near become at bringing the teen speech to set herself that bridge") or which mainstream close to the apart, and the result is, for snowboarding mountain has cooler kids-Stratton, in and Polo Sport and Reebok Hilfiger by the hip-hop Vermont, or Summit Classics on their feet. But auteur Grand Puba, who County, in Colorado. when I asked DeeDee about wore a dark-green-and-blue (Summit, definitely.) that, she just rolled her eyes: Tommy jacket over a white DeeDee can tell you on the "Sometimes Baysie goes off on Tommy T-shirt as he leaned basis of the L Report's these tangents. Man, I love on his black Lamborghini on research exactly how far that woman!" the cover of the hugely Dallas is behind New York in influential "Grand Puba coolness (from six to eight I used to think that if I talked 2000" CD, and whose love months). Baysie is to Baysie and DeeDee long for Hilfiger soon spread to convinced that Los Angeles enough I could write a other rappers. (Who could is not happening right now: coolhunting manual, an forget the rhymes of Mobb "In the early nineteen- encyclopedia of cool. But then Deep? "Tommy was my nineties a lot more was I realized that the manual nigga /And couldn't figure coming from L.A. They had would have so many footnotes /How me and Hilfiger / used a big trend with the whole and caveats that it would be to move through with Melrose Avenue look-the unreadable. Coolhunting is vigor.") Then I had lunch stupid goatees, the shorter not about the articulation of a with one of Hilfiger's hair. It was cleaned-up coherent philosophy of cool. designers, a twenty-six-year- aftergrunge. There were a lot It's just a collection of old named Ulrich (Ubi) of places you could go to buy spontaneous observations and Simpson, who has a Puerto vinyl records. It was a strong predictions that differ from Rican mother and a Dutch- place to go for looks. Then it one moment to the next and Venezuelan father, plays went back to being horrible." from one coolhunter to the lacrosse, snowboards, surfs DeeDee is convinced that next. Ask a coolhunter where the long board, goes to hip- Japan is happening: "I the baggy-jeans look came hop concerts, listens to linked onto this future- from, for example, and you Jungle, Edith Piaf, opera, technology thing two years might get any number of rap, and Metallica, and has ago. Now look at it, it's huge. answers: urban black kids working with him on his It's the whole resurgence of mimicking the jailhouse look, design team a twenty-seven- Nike-Nike being larger than skateboarders looking for year-old black guy from life. I went to Japan and saw room to move, snowboarders Montclair with dreadlocks, a the kids just bailing the most trying not to look like skiers, twenty-two-year-old Asian- technologically advanced or, alternatively, all three at American who lives on the Nikes with their little once, in some grand Lower East Side, a twenty- dresses and little outfits and concordance.