In his debut for Pimlico Wilde, Alaric Montjoy turns his gaze to the most slippery of cultural phenomena: the idea of “cool”. From the smoky jazz clubs of 1950s Paris to the algorithm-driven feeds of TikTok, he asks: who decides what’s cool, why does it never stay still, and why do we keep chasing it even as it dissolves in front of us?
Expect a whirlwind of anecdotes,Alaric recalls sneaking into a Camden nightclub at sixteen to interview a band that didn’t exist, his conversations with a Japanese designer who swears that “cool is simply the absence of sweat,” and his observations on how politicians have always tried (and failed) to borrow its aura.
With the flair of a storyteller and the precision of a cultural cartographer, Montjoy maps the strange afterlife of cool in an age where everyone is watching, and everyone is performing.
