Style vs. Cool

There is an important distinction that needs to be drawn between ‘cool’ and ‘style’. This is important, as I will inevitably critique cars that are cool, but that do not have style.

Let me see if I can explain.

Cool is the quality that teenagers mistake for style.

There are certain rules that one should live by.

One of those is that, by age 25 you need to have stopped blaming your parents for things that happen in your life.

A second is that, at about the same age, you need to stop pursuing ‘cool’, and being pursuing ‘style’. You may never succeed, particularly if you are a man, because every man has inside him a small boy aged between about six and ten, and that small boy will always be susceptible to ‘cool’. But that is by the by. It is the pursuit that matters.

To relate this to cars: just because a car is cool, it does not follow that the car has style.

The small boy inside you, or the teenage boy, will mistake the cool for style, and that boy will be mistaken.

For example: you can make pretty much any car cool by giving it 400 horsepower. It’s really that simple. You cannot, however, make a car stylish by giving it 400hp.



So the Porsche Cayenne, a big jumped up SUV with over 400hp, does have an element of cool, but is in every other way hideous. It is enormous and ugly and overweight. And it has the complete absence of style.

Actually, as I think about it more, I suspect that the 400hp rule applies to almost anything. Give a motorcycle 400hp, and it’s cool. Or a 400hp skateboard. Cool.

A while back, I even saw a 400hp twin-turbo diesel wood-chipper, much like this. This thing was so big you could put an entire tree with a four foot diameter trunk in it, and it would turn the tree into woodchips. That was cool.

But none of these things, with their 400hp, have style. It’s fair to say that there is no correlation at all between power and style. 400hp doesn’t preclude style, but it doesn’t endow style either. We need to bear this in mind when considering a powerful car.



Going back to the Porsche example, this is a 912, the version of the 911 that came with a four cylinder engine carried over from the last 356. They usually had about 90hp, though there were variations. Style wise, it exceeds the Cayenne immensely.



And this is a Porsche 356. Again, the most common versions had between 70 and 95hp, well less than a quarter the power of a Cayenne, but immensely greater style.

But, why do the 356 and the 912 have style, where the Cayenne does not? Well, in the first instance, because the Cayenne is a hugely ugly, hugely expensive billboard advertising how rich you are. It’s about as easy to be stylish in a Cayenne as it is to be stylish while wearing a necklace that spells out your net worth in diamonds.

But why the 356 and 912 have style? I cannot yet explain this.

This is why we need a philosophy of style.