Abstract
This pervasive influence of Coolhunting is the motivation behind this paper. Being touched by the Coolhunt raised legitimate questions. Client and researcher wanted to know if they should be Coolhunting, or at least doing something similar. The critics (and the public they spoke for) wanted to know if they should acquiesce in the role of quarry in the hunt. What follows is an analysis of how the Coolhunt works. It looks to both question and interrogate Coolhunting's explicit and implicit assumptions. Key amongst these assumptions is the belief that cool is in some sense beyond analysis. Cool is ineluctably recondite. It may be described but any attempt to develop prescriptive criteria must necessarily be jejune and insipid. Central to this paper's argument is the contrary claim that cool is open to analysis.
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