she's a cool girl.

the modern girl's guide to cultivating an effortless persona

It starts out easy, a shrug of the shoulders, a toss of your perfectly messy hair, just enough to physically say “I’m too cool for this.” Slowly you grasp the fundamentals, your vibe is everything, beauty comes second. Coolness is coveted over looking pretty. Drunk cigarettes, second-hand paperbacks with writing in the margins, vintage purse full of tchotchkes and lipstick-smudged receipts, red painted nails standing out against the stem of a martini glass, ordered “extra dirty” with a smirk, everything curated to perfection, a how-to guide practically screaming out “I’m a cool girl.”

setting the scene for you

Cool girl books, movies to watch if you’re a cool girl, cool girl restaurants in NYC, here’s what the cool girls are wearing for summer; everything is drawn up, the blueprints laid, to replicate this image collectively chosen to be aspirational. Who is the arbiter, the titular cool girl, when did she become someone we easily put into a box? Cycle through the Lily-Rose Depps, the NYC influencers, anyone with a vibe that can seemingly be replicated. Another label, another marketing tactic, “I’m different from the rest” a chorus of voices call out, indistinguishable as Reformation-clad bodies blend into one being.

Personalities are in, haven’t you heard, but why the same one? Fall in line with the masses, order extra olives, replicate the vibes that a friend of a friend of a TikTok mutual said was cool. I thought personalities were meant to be unique, that part of you built up from years of self-discovery, not a cookie cutter you force yourself to fit into. Hobbies and niche interests, that one Vine you saw and became obsessed with when you were 14 are the building blocks to uniqueness, to true, unfounded coolness. It’s what we all long for, the type of charisma and personality that can never be replicated. If it’s attempted, it comes off wrong, warped, something that reads as a caricature of the original.

It’s ironic, the desire to exude an effortless personality; representing the pinnacle of nonchalance and coolness is celebrated and strived for, yet in a culture where influencers and celebrities determine what’s “in,” it’s all but obsolete. Suddenly, we need guides to tell us what is interesting, we pick our favorite books from a list a self-proclaimed “thought daughter” on the internet told us she loved. It takes more effort to continuously keep up with what is cool, follow the guides and watch the TikToks saying what hobbies are in for summer than to figure out what you love for yourself. I feel like Kim Kardashian saying this, but no one wants to put in work to figure out what they enjoy for themselves. It’s all there, the click of a button, typing “cool girl” into a search bar, someone already wrote it down or made a video, so there’s no need for trial and error, picking up new hobbies, and learning passions.

There’s a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I can’t help but think of, “The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.” In the modern, digital society, nothing is worse than becoming uninteresting, irrelevant, swallowed up by the masses and spit back out the picture of mundanity. Cool is the new beautiful, it’s a currency more precious than jewels. When digging into the heart of what makes something or someone cool, it almost always comes down to possessing or seeing something inherently unique. Being interested in things means observing the world around you, absorbing the beauty in little details— a spread of tulips growing in the community garden, smile lines on a lover’s face, the slight scuff on a favorite pair of shoes—it’s cultivating passions from those observations, regardless of whether your friends are interested or someone online can get a million views from talking about it.

There’s such a widespread fear of being perceived as uninteresting that the easy solution is to latch onto the things that the louder, more prevalent voices, the so-called tastemakers perceive as cool. When the answers are out in front of you, it’s always easier to steal a peek instead of wracking your brain for what you know deep down. It takes a moment to untangle it from that beautiful, complex web of thoughts, take a breath, slowly untangle the strings, it means so much more than copying and pasting what’s right in front of you. There’s immediate value in coolness, buy cherry red ballet flats for autumn, Patti Smith’s Just Kids for the essential cool girl book to read on a train. You buy and collect and begin to hoard items that someone told you would make you more interesting, more appealing. Appealing. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Is this all to please the ever-present patriarchal eye, looming menacingly, barely caring how we look or act as long as our breasts are perky and we can mold ourselves into what they want us to be?

Is this where I’m supposed to reference the Gone Girl monologue? “Cool girl. Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment.” That one. There’s something there, a reason why so many women read Gone Girl or saw the movie and had that specific monologue resonate. “Cool girl” described how men saw the women they wanted—hot, willing to do anything they asked— to men, being cool was the ultimate compliment, a trophy handed out to only the best women. She smiles pretty and likes what he likes, her personality revolves around him. The cool girl reeked of the male gaze, the internalized misogyny you told yourself you didn’t have jumped out whenever you watched them together in public. Him towing her around like a doll, her somehow a beautiful shell of a human, and you—fearing that you’ll become her, silent, obedient, cool.

The effortless internet girl, our faceless, nameless, charismatic persona, became the cool girl. I’d like to think it’s a reclamation of the term from the masculine version, though. “She’s so cool, she’d drink a beer with us” turned into “she’s so cool, her vintage Miu Miu is to die for.” It’s everything re-packaged, centering the female gaze instead. The cool girl or at least the version we look at today, caters to what women find interesting, enviable, ready to drop thousands of dollars to achieve. The kicker is the cool girl, the internet girl, is fake. Almost no one that puts themself into these boxes on the internet exists like that in real life. They exaggerate, play it up, know how influential their content will be but continue the charade. Young girls used to be told that they needed to be pretty, that everyone would want to be them when they were beautiful, and now they’re meant to be interesting, cool, and enigmatic. Regardless of how it’s packaged, a girl will never escape the world telling her what she’s meant to be.

I want to be cool, I crave it, but being a cool girl would eat me alive.

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follow me on instagram and tell me that i’m cool and pretty @peoples.princess

with love,

sarah 🤍