Coolhunting
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Academics are intrigued by the fact that the DJ makes a living by filtering information; he makes sense of the confusing mass of musical information that bombards us (there are well over 200 dance singles released each week). There's no way that we could find all the great music within our favorite genre, so we rely on DJs to do it for us. They are like personal shoppers who sift through the hundreds of crap records and find the ones we like. These days, fewer and fewer people buy singles; instead, we decide on our favorite DJs and let them buy them for us. Why spend your life obsessively searching for obscure records (in which case you're probably a DJ anyway) when you can buy a DJ-mixed compilation CD made by someone who does that for a living? You could say that these days we don't buy particular records, we buy particular DJs." -- Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (1999) by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton |
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Coolhunting is a term coined in the early 1990s referring to a new breed of marketing professionals, called coolhunters. It is their job to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends. The word derives from the aesthetic of "cool".
In a way they continue the work of tastemaker of the past who included art critics, art sellers and buyers of cultural products and fads and trends.
In this they resemble the intuitive fashion magazine editors of the 1960s such as Nancy White (Harper's Bazaar 1958-1971). Coolhunters operate most notably in the world of street fashion and design, but their work also blurs into that of futurists such as Faith Popcorn. Many webloggers now serve as online coolhunters, in a variety of cultural and technological areas.
Pattern Recognition, a 2003 novel by William Gibson, features a coolhunter as its main character.
See also
- Coolhunting
- Cultural criticism
- Critic
- DJs as tastemakers
- Fashion victim
- Connoisseur
- Taste
- Trendsetter
