‘The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on’, Malcolm Gladwell proclaimed in the 1997 New Yorker piece, ‘The Coolhunt’, that has since become part of the canon when it comes to defining trends and a culture obsessed with The Next Big Thing.

By that logic, it came as no surprise when Australia’s University of New South Wales last week announced that we had reached a point called ‘peak beard’. That is, the more men we see wearing beards, a hairy badge of honour that marks the cool craft beer drinkers and crate diggers from the lager-swilling shirt-and-shoes lads with Blurred Lines blaring from their car stereos, the less cool we actually think they are.

If cool is by its very nature elusive, then when a trend becomes so ubiquitous that the lines are indeed blurred between the hipsters and the hoons, can it still be defined as such? What tips a trend from niche to normal? And should we cool-fearing folk, who pride ourselves on living beyond the norm(core), abandon it when that happens?

It isn't just beards that become entangled in the knotty business of what’s cool and what isn’t. It’s a debate that has dogged fashion since its genesis. Louis XIV wore elaborate collars and cuffs with his luxe silk suits for the same reason the kids skulking around The Royal Oak on Columbia Road have directional and difficult to manage haircuts: everyone else isn’t doing it. So when everyone else does catch on to a trend, either through increased accessibility, or simple copycat behaviour, how can it still be cool?

‘I absolutely think that things can still be cool when lots of people like them, like, Game of Thrones and True Detective’, Bertie Brandes, freelance writer and former fashion editor of renowned cool-authority, Vice Magazine, told us. But, when it comes to fashion, ‘If someone’s wearing something they wouldn’t normally wear just because it’s ‘on trend’, that’s the least cool thing ever’.

"The process of discovery to saturation has become impossibly fast. It's no longer an organic drip-feed of street culture to high fashion to everyone else a year later"

The problem is, in a digital age where your Instagram feed can fill with copycat selfies just days after Kate Moss discovers a new way to roll up her skinny jeans, it isn’t hard for a trend to catch on, and the process of discovery to stale saturation has become impossibly fast. We’re no longer talking an organic drip-feed of street culture to style muses to high fashion to dedicated magazine magpies - to everyone else a year later. Nowadays high street brands are wise to what their customers are googling, and which of the freshly snapped street style is being re-blogged the most on Tumblr, a level of insight which acts like rocket fuel in fast-tracking a look from obscure to everywhere.

‘There’s a lot more communication between brands and the customer, particularly online,’ Summer Camp’s Elizabeth Sankey told us when we spoke to her recently about the rise and rise of the 90s trend. ‘They can look at Tumblr and say, “OK, this is what girls like”’. Stylist Charlie Moore agrees that trends could enjoy a longer life before being demoted to démodé in a pre-digital era. ‘When I first started it felt more like trends had an osmosis about them and their growth was a bit more organic, which probably made things have more longevity’, she says, adding that ‘now when people are uploading pictures of everything to Instagram and Twitter, you get bored of something more quickly because you’ve already seen it everywhere.’

So how do you set your style apart from a sea of homogeny, and thus retain your cool, when, as Moore notes, simply shopping on the high street means ‘You walk down the street and there’s someone with the same thing as you’? Well, the answer is actually quite simple: be yourself.

‘Pretty much everything is timeless if you wear it in the right way or with conviction,’ Brandes said. ‘It helps to have a fashion icon, but at the end of the day what you’re wearing has to suit you.’ She continued, ‘You can’t just look like you’ve picked it up because you heard it was cool’.

"‘If someone’s wearing something they wouldn’t normally wear just because it’s ‘on trend’, that’s the least cool thing ever’." - Bertie Brandes

In fact, when asked about whether beards were still in vogue, she sounds almost exasperated at the idea of having to categorise everything as cool or otherwise. ‘I have no idea whether they’re cool’, she sighed. ‘My dad has a beard and I think he’s cool, but I don’t think he has it in a cool way. I think beards are exempt from being cool, they’re just facial hair.’

The idea of simply sticking with what you know and love isn’t necessarily without its problems though. To return to Gladwell’s ‘Coolhunt’, referring to a man without a Spidey-sense for style, he points out that, ‘because he wasn’t cool, he didn’t know cool, and that’s the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one.’

Is coolness then the reserve of a blessed few, gifted by the spirits of Elvis and Louise Brooks at birth? Charlie Moore offers more hope. ‘If you’re really comfortable and confident you can pull things off a lot more easily’, she explained. ‘Angelina Jolie really doesn’t experiment at all. She’s just going with what she knows works and looks confident because of it - that’s why I think people who have their own unique style, something you can’t put your finger on, look great.’

Indeed, the confidence with which Brandes - who is ‘very into 70s at the moment, but like, actually stuff from the 70s, not just 70s-inspired stuff from the high street, because that just looks cheap’ - dismisses the importance of trends goes a long way to explain her cool status. Maybe then, the secret of being cool, is to simply not engage with coolness at all, and that’s something we can all do.

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