Defining Cool (Cont'd)
The Manolo comments on the item below: "Ultimately, however, although the Virginia can point to the items of coolness, she cannot explain exactly what it is that makes them cool. This it is because the 'coolness'" is more about the emotional than the intellectual."
Coolness, like any aesthetic response, is (to quote myself in umpteen speeches) "immediate, perceptual, and emotional. It is not cognitive." Trying to make aesthetic value cognitive leads analysts of all sorts to fixate on status and exclusivity, because they're easy to understand.
That said, with enough after-the-fact cognitive effort, I think it's possible to identify elements, like flatness in electronics, that make something cool, at least at a particular moment in time. Graceful ingenuity, like that displayed in Podlowski's rings, is cool. If I work hard enough, I might even be able to articulate some of the factors that make the BCBG bags cool. But this is a blog, and I'm too lazy to make the effort. (I've spent the last year writing thousands of unpublished words analyzing glamour, another powerful, intangible quality that depends on the audience's imagination.)
What's really hard about explaining "cool" isn't analyzing an object you've already decided is cool. It's creating a cool object in the first place. You can't just mix and match known elements to solve a well-defined problem. You have to intuit what will evoke the right emotions.