Chasing The Cool Girl

The 'cool girl' phenomenon is back and it’s just as problematic as ever.

Cool girls at Coperni and Khaite. Photo credit: Vogue Runway

About ten years ago, one of the worst things you could call a woman was a ‘cool girl’. Gillian Flynn’s novel ‘Gone Girl’ was everywhere, and if you didn’t read the book (2012), you perhaps watched the film directed by David Fincher (2014). You couldn’t avoid coming across the ‘cool girl’ monologue of the Gone Girl title character, Amy Dunne: 

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

The ‘cool girl’ monologue paved the way for other common misogynistic female stereotypes from cinema and entertainment to be dragged out in the open: the manic pixie dream girl, the man stealer, the sexy secretary, the asexual career woman, the sassy black woman, among others. We began to deconstruct the way women were portrayed in the media, and this coincided with a period of time in fashion where after an era of hypersexualized, disturbingly ‘young’ fashion of the aughts, women were finally given the types of clothes that they wanted to wear by Phoebe Philo at Céline. For some time, it seemed like fashion was serious about widening its concept of what a woman is supposed to look like. The runways seemed ever so slightly more inclusive and grown up. Editorials and ad campaigns starred more models of color, different body types, and even women over the age of 40. Things weren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it felt like we were at least making progress. 

It seems to me that ‘cool girl’ is creeping back into fashion. TikTok has 2.8 billion hits for the hashtag #coolgirl. Cool girl’s more polished friend, #cleangirl, has over 6 billion hits. Becky Malinsky recently described a shift change at the recent Spring/Summer 2024 fashion weeks: designers went from dressing adult women last season to ‘cool girls’ the next. She described ‘cool girls’ as “... girls (women but “girl mindset” if you know what I mean?) who are doing things. There is a gamine, sexy, rough around the edges quality […]. Less buttoned up, more thrown on and thrifted.” Jessica Testa of The New York Times wrote about the ‘cool girl’ customer associated with the brand Khaite as “composed, distinct – no one else is wearing this outfit – without trying too hard. She may be wearing something just edgy enough to catch eyes but not turn heads. The style is kind of a camouflage, in that she rarely looks out of place, never overdressed or underdressed.” 

The ultimate ‘cool girls’ are manufactured versions of ‘a diamond in the rough’. To be cool is to not really care all that much, or at least to look like you don’t. ‘Cool girls’ are supposed to try, but not be desperate; to be beautiful, but not too womanly; to be interesting, but not weird; to smile, but not laugh out loud; to be sexy, but not slutty; to be smart, but not voice strong opinions, to be a little bit wild, but never out of control. The behavioral traits that have been linked to coolness include sexual appetite, risk-taking, masculinity, and muted emotion. Essentially, coolness has a male gaze. ‘Cool girls’ are possible only because they are expected to fake their coolness to begin with.

The current iteration of the ‘cool girl’ is a unicorn, an impossible creature, much like the perfect housewife of the 1950s. These female tropes don't exist in real life, but yet women seem to be drawn to their unreachable standards like moths to a flame. The problem is that the ‘cool girl’ and the perfect housewife always play against the girl who is not cool, or the wife who is not perfect. It’s a status game where women are positioned against other women. I detect a familiar misogynistic and ageist tone in current ‘cool girl’ talk: the ‘cool girl’ aesthetic exists in order to reject what ‘most women’, especially older women, wear. There’s toxic empowerment in positioning oneself against what most grown women look like. Don’t be ordinary or basic, be cool! Who wouldn’t want to be a little bit more special than the rest? 

‘Cool girls’ remove women out of the conversation, or force them into girl-land. Heck, The Cut called Dame Maggie Smith, who stars in Loewe’s recent campaign at 88 years old, a ‘Loewe Girl’. That’s problematic, because language matters. When women are called ‘girls’, they are pushed into the territory that belongs to children. Dr Harriet Lerner argues that “[the] preferred use of the terms "girl," "lady," or "gal" often reflects an unconscious wish to define women in narrow, non-threatening, or diminutive terms.” 

David W. Marx writes in his book ‘Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion and Constant Change’ (2022) that the existence of fashion cycles is tied to the need to mark a difference. Fads and fashions function as a switch from what was before. In our era of information overload, where consumers have become exhausted around change, argues Marx, we get drawn to cultural stasis in which “the reliable past is more useful for crafting personas than an ephemeral present”. It follows, then, that we are tempted to look to the past as we try to find ways to stay on top of the status game. For the advancement of women’s rights, the past isn’t exactly the type of place that should resonate with us, but it seems to, anyway. It’s not just about fashion and trends, either.  

Last month, the United Nations General Assembly Third Committee delegates from all over the world lamented the decline in women’s rights recently. Girls and women are once again barred from going to school in Afghanistan. At the current rate of progress, it will take 300 years to end child marriage in Nepal. In the United States women make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, and this statistic has remained unchanged for 20 years. It is estimated that 47% of women in Finland have experienced domestic violence. Global turmoil has historically put women further out of reach of gender equality. These tumultuous times of ours are no joke, so where does that leave us – women and girls?

The Phoebe Philo launch this Monday had me rethink my argument for a moment. I wrote that the previous ‘cool girl’ craze in fashion seemed to come to a close with Philo’s Céline, and here is Philo again, a woman who designs for women. As I browsed the Phoebe Philo site out of curiosity and read some reviews earlier this week, it occurred to me that the ‘cool girl’ trope extends to women after all, and that maybe it has a side-show that’s not so much about ‘girls vs women’ but just about our desire to be perceived as a particular kind of ‘cool’. Luxury fashion is about access to a type of ‘cool’ that’s a privilege, and where being ‘cool’ comes down to various degrees of exclusivity. Wealth and body size play the game of inclusion and exclusion here. Are you cool enough to afford Phoebe Philo? Cool enough to have nabbed that MUM necklace before anybody else did? Cool enough to fit into the clothes? It’s a fight the marginalized can never win, and that’s definitely – you guessed it – not cool.