What is the real definition of "Cooool"?

Dust off your dial telephone and move to the suburbs - everything old and daggy is cool again.

Eytan Messiah, 22, has been a poet for four years. With spoken-word shows swelling up in pubs and popping up on youth radio stations such as FBi and 2SER, Messiah's once-fringe hobby has gone from wanky to swanky. His early gigs were attended only by other performers, but this year Messiah was one of six poets to take the stage in Slamming, a spoken-word extravaganza funded by the Riverside Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. "It's funny how fads enter cultures and help us along a bit," he says. It's not just poetry that's doing a 180. When Huey Lewis sang, "It's hip to be square," in 1986, who would have thought people would take his word for it? Today, things that were traditionally the domain of the dork, dag and nerd have made it to the cutting edge of pop culture. Uncool is the new cool.

Ugh boots and thongs are staples in any Hollywood fashionista's wardrobe. Models knit to pass the time backstage at catwalk shows and funky youngsters go lawn bowling of a Sunday afternoon. Even Australia's bowls representatives are becoming cooler. Five of 11 players on the national men's and women's teams are under 30. And no pseudo-intellectual, artiste or wanker would be seen dead without chunky framed spectacles - just like the ones Colonel Sanders used to wear. Pubs are being "renovated" with worn-out couches like the junk people leave on footpaths for students to pick up. We used to laugh at the geeks who loved electronics like girlfriend substitutes, but now all we talk about is the iPod we have or the iPod we want.

And where fruit was once something we tried to avoid, these days it's so tasty when blended with a weird low-fat yoghurt substance, we'll pay $5 at a juice bar for it. The word "cool" was coined by black jazz musicians in the 1940s and became part of the popular vernacular with the birth of the teenager in the 1950s. From the 1960s, advertisers have used cool to try to get young people to spend money and since the 1990s it has been a "major factor in popular society and consumer culture", says Seamus Byrne, a media and tech journalist writing a PhD at the University of NSW on "How Cool Works". The Cambridge Dictionaries Online define "cool" as "fashionable or attractive", but outside the confines of a dictionary, the meaning of cool is not so clear. Byrne says: "That's the million-dollar question. If you could nail that one down in a nutshell, you'd make a lot of money." In a consumer society that tells us that image is everything but coolness is elusive ("if you're trying to be cool, then you're not," Byrne says), the whole "uncool is cool" phenomenon seems as disorientating as a broken compass. But, according to the experts, the fact that "uncool is the new cool" makes perfect sense. "Cool is defined as being special, out of the ordinary in some way," says Irma Zandl, the president of Zandl Group, a boutique trend research agency in SoHo, New York. Most trends start on the edge of society with "indies" or "creative hipsters", before moving into the mainstream, Zandl says. "Indies value being different and have an aversion to the mainstream," she says. "For example, if hotties like Ashton Kutcher or Paris Hilton are driving sexier fashion trends, indies will go for the chunky glasses look. The 'old man geezer' look is quite popular here [in the US] with young guys." Harry Blatterer, a social researcher at the University of NSW, sees the "uncool is cool" phenomenon as a reaction to the "merchants of cool" - the marketers and advertising executives who try to dictate what young consumers should want and buy. "If that means that they [young people] are engaging in practices that were once defined as uncool, then that's cool," he says. But rebellious consumers are not just cutting cultural products from the past and pasting them into 2005. Annalise Brown, director of the youth marketing agency Spin, says: "I don't think it's necessarily that they're coming back in the same format, it's using elements of the past and putting a different spin on it." "In the '90s and through to now there's certainly [been] a big retro phenomenon," says Byrne, "it's a mark of the noughties that people are finding more and more traditional, conservative entertainment forms and updating them." That's why our ugh boots now come in a range of colours and we go lawn bowling in bare feet while drinking beer. The rise of uncoolness is also due to a more relaxed breed of young consumer: "I think young people are much more open-minded about what counts as cool, so that's a definite shift; they're less worried about what is actually trendy," Blatterer says. The phenomenon is being helped by the nature of today's trend cycles. It's certainly not new that things move in and out of fashion (knickerbockers, anyone?) but the progression from cool to uncool and back again is much quicker today. This means more things are trendier but for shorter periods of time. That speed is due to our "huge appetite for novelty", Zandl says. "There do seem to be more fads than at any time in the past. We have a more fragmented consumer base and increasing media focus on trends and fads." There might be another reason for it - there is a comfort factor involved with uncoolness. Even though modern society is highly fragmented, everyone is affected by the unpredictable nature of the labour market, Blatterer says: "Life for young people is very, very uncertain now. I think it's very much about getting back to a time where everything was much more certain. I think it's a meaning-making exercise [and] about young people trying to find an anchor." So, while Messiah is enjoying the financial benefits of the boom in poetry appreciation, he hasn't given up his "thousand" day jobs just yet. "I'd like to see how long it'll last," he says. "I don't care if it's cool. I remember when it wasn't cool and I was still having just as much fun."

WHAT'S COMING BACK NEXT?
+ Spin Marketing's Annalise Brown says rollerskating and roller discos will soon be back, as will telephones with dials. Slow food that you've prepared from scratch will be cool again. And from a fashion perspective: "I think ultra-conservative will come back, the preppy, nerdy, almost computer-geek look."

+ Irma Zandl, of Zandl Group, predicts that the suburbs, pot-luck dinners and gaming will soon be seriously cool. + Seamus Byrne from UNSW agrees that old '80s table-top arcade games are "definitely on the way back", as are old gadgets that "people have managed to hold onto and not throw away". Nintendo's Game & Watch hand-held console from the '80s is set to be cool once more because it looks similar to the new Nintendo DS (Dual Screen). But keep your old Game Boy in the garage. Byrne says it won't be revived any time soon, as it's "too uncomfortable and unwieldy" compared with newer, smaller products.

Judith Ireland