You don’t know her, but you want to be her.
The cool, it, chic, whimsical girl who’s all over your socials. Despite the different names she might have, she is always the same girl. Just repackaged to fit different aesthetics that are trending.
I, for one, am tired of being force-fed the ‘cool girl’ package.
In my life, being cool is an unattainable ideal I have always been attracted to. Coolness has always been associated with masculine interests: sports, drinking beer, and liking classic films are all examples of traits which could make a young woman a “cool girl.”
What is cool to the average young man is what makes a woman cool too, as they are deemed valid through a patriarchal lens. As patriarchal structures center male experiences, female-dominated characteristics often wind up being looked down upon, labelled “less cool.”
Female-dominated interests, like reading fiction and watching rom-coms, are constantly devalued. But when a man has the same interests, he is seen as novel and interesting. I grew up with an unnamed understanding of this idea. Knowing that I will never be posted on an Instagram account just for being semi-attractive and literate, because I am a woman.
The cool girl is chill; she goes with the flow, she’s agreeable, the cool girl doesn’t spend too much time on her outfit, but she looks incredible whenever she leaves the house.
A “cool girl” wears makeup, but it has to be natural. She must keep an outward appearance of pleasing femininity, while at the same time saying she rejects what makes her feminine. Gillian Flynn says it best in her 2012 novel, Gone Girl: “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” trope has always been here; it was given a name by Flynn in 2012, and its grown legs with modern short-term content.
The “cool girl” package is parceled into a 15-second video and fed to thousands of screens with every scroll. Because of its rise in popularity, the “cool girl” has become an easy way to advertise consumer culture. Promoting the idea of the “cool girl” through visual aesthetics pushes forward the idea that a woman can become the person she tries to emulate by wearing the clothes that she wears and using the same products.
The #coolgirlaesthetic that’s trending on TikTok is a perfect example of this. Women are sold clothes marketed as “cool” as an easy way to fit in. Just click the affiliate link from your favourite “cool girl clothing haul,” and you too can be who they are.
With TikTok trends comes the short life cycle. When certain looks stop being marketable and trendy, influencers repackage the same ideas with a different name, but it always follows the same concept of how to be a cool girl. Right now, the popular aesthetic that’s being mass marketed on social media is the “whimsical girl,” but trend cycles can be traced by looking at the popularity of keyword aesthetics, from it girls, to chic girls, to e-girls, and coquette girls, to name a few.
If a woman’s “coolness” is constantly being packaged and sold in an always vague and equally arbitrary curated set of ever-changing factors, “cool” is an impossible thing to be. So why try to be cool at all?
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