The Conquest of Cool

Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

Thomas Frank

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780226260129, 9780226259918
• eBook ISBN: 9780226924632
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: History

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined—and even anticipated —by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business.

"[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment."—Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review

"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit."—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail

"The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. . . . His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century."—T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times

"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the era's advertising."—Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine

"Tom Frank is . . . not only old-fashioned, he's anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics."—Roger Trilling, Details

index

account executives, 35; in corporate-style agencies, 78, 100; in Creative Revolution of the sixties, 96–97; as WASPs, 96

Adams, John A., 116, 122

Adler, Lee, 116–17

advertising: advertisements of the sixties, 132–67; advertising industry denounced in, 144; anti-advertising, 55, 68; antithetical cultural poles in, 38–39, 47; as art, 56–57, 93; and business revolution of the sixties, 26; central themes of, in the sixties, 136; conformity mocked in sixties’, 136–40; on the counterculture, 27, 108–11, 119–23; counterculture in contemporary, 4–5; the counterculture mistrusting, 108; creativity in, 37, 39, 41–42, 50, 88–103, 227; critique of itself, 9, 41; cultural change caused by and reflected in, 31; Federal Trade Commission actions, 225; and Generation X, 233–34; growth during the sixties, 91; and high culture, 36; hip ads as percentage of all ads, 237–43; hip advertisements before 1965, 133–34; hip as staple of, 32; and hip consumerism, 26–28; the hip despising, 107; mass society criticized in, 55, 76; National Organization of Women accusations, 225; in the nineties, 53, 227; nonconformity recognized by, 89–90, 94; Vance Packard on, 11, 40–41, 45, 62, 75, 209; primary cultural function of, 49; science as principle of, 39–47; self-reference in, 65, 70; silent majority of youth ignored by, 109; skepticism toward, 63, 226, 234; spokesmen, 71–72, 141–42; subliminals in, 31, 250n. 9; before World War II, 133; worst ads as those of the fifties, 47–50; youth culture mocked in, 148–51. See also advertising agencies; Creative Revolution in advertising

Advertising Age (magazine), 44, 96, 120, 124, 225

advertising agencies: boutiques, 97, 198; Della Femina on corporate-s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Praise for the conquest of cool
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• one. A Cultural Perpetual Motion Machine: Management Theory and Consumer Revolution in the 1960s
• two. Buttoned Down: High Modernism on Madison Avenue
• three. Advertising as Cultural Criticism: Bill Bernbach versus the Mass Society
• four. Three Rebels: Advertising Narratives of the Sixties
• five. “How Do We Break These Conformists of Their Conformity?”: Creativity Conquers All
• six. Think Young: Youth Culture and Creativity
• seven. The Varieties of Hip: Advertisements of the 1960s
• eight. Carnival and Cola: Hip versus Square in the Cola Wars
• nine. Fashion and Flexibility
• ten. Hip and Obsolescence
• eleven. Hip as Official Capitalist Style
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index