What is "Cool"?

Recently we’ve been contemplating the state of men’s fashion.

A trip to Regent Street – okay, hardly the cutting-edge of contemporary fashion but a retail landmark nevertheless – threw us into deep gloom.

Apart from the scintillating colours in Desigual, we found men’s clothing shops awash with blacks and greys. As if this country has elected to swathe itself in mourning for the remaining winter months.

What is it with the fashion industry? Do they really think that men are so terminally depressed as to want to wear black 24/7?

Brilliant then to find a pair of independent fashion blogs busting the myth of dull fashion. Welcome to the wonderful world of Steve Salter and Susanna Lau, real-life partners, and each with their very different but equally quirky sites at Style Salvage and Style Bubble .

Scrolling down through these blogs, one’s treated to a gallery of stylish, exotic and idiosyncratic designs. What’s more the ravishing images are matched by equally stylish and intelligent prose. And how about British designer Sarah Williams' fantastic luggage, posted on Style Salvage only yesterday.

Photo courtesy of Williams British Handmade

Contemplating some of the cool designs online, we’ve been reminded of an illuminating essay Cool Hunting With Aristotle by Nick Southgate, a trained philosopher. Southgate mounts a hilarious attack on companies’ desperate attempts to hire cool people to find out what cool people are doing.

As a philosopher, Southgate refuses to base his observations on fashion on anything as reductive as market research or commercial popularity. Instead, he enlists help from ancient philosopher, Aristotle, as his touchstone.

It was Aristotle who first outlined a series of principles concerning the virtues of life, many of which have direct application to an understanding of ‘cool’.

In recent years, fashion companies have tried to master the art of ‘cool hunting’, predicting coming styles through a mixture of market research and commercial trend analysis. Southgate contents that this way lies death. What are needed are designers and companies brave enough to follow their own instincts and to develop brands that play to their personal passions.

He argues that fashion design should constantly seek to push at the margins, linked to whatever its designer’s deepest values might be:
“If one thinks that sport should be democratic, then develop a sports brand that is about justice (arguably where Nike started, but not where they have ended up). If you think fashion is too magnificent, re-discover its generosity. If fashion is too witty, use it to tug at justice. If fashion dealing with justice is too rich for you, reassert its friendliness or truthfulness. Each will create new ways of being cool and maybe find an audience”.

They’re words close to our heart. At Millican, we believe in vintage, classic design wedded to strong ethical and eco standards.

One of our templates for design has been an old Victorian Dunhill bag that we own. Susanna Lau celebrates a similar bag in one of her January blogs. When we’re able to draw on such vintage design, combine it with contemporary functionality, and meet the highest sustainable standards, that’s given us the biggest kick of all.


Classic design combined with contemporary craftsmanship and ethically sourced materials and working practices. We’ve no idea whether that ticks any market research boxes, but it’s our idea of ‘cool’.

So rather than just wandering the shops of Regent Street lamenting clothes in the new grey or black, we’re taking inspiration from these fashion blogs and will do more of our shopping online with, for example estore Oki Ni and independents like Oi Polloi. We all need chain stores at times but for wit, originality and true style, it’s the independent mavericks that have it.