The contemporary Cool attitude -- also known as Hip -- is barely fifty years old, but its roots are older than that and its social significance has changed dramatically during its history. Robins and Pountain trace Cool's ancient origins in African, European, and Asian cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. The book examines art movements, music, cinema and literature, moving from the beaux, fops, dandies, flaneurs, mashers and swells who combined attitudes of narcissism, nonchalance, wit and hedonism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s.

What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities has mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as advertisers cynically exploit it to create a constantly updated bricolage of personal styles, postures and entertainments designed to sell products.