05/23/2026
“If there is hope for American style to survive the end of the American century, it will be with the help of outsiders.”
That quote is from a recent article titled “How American Cool Dies” about the steady deflation of what is arguably this country’s foremost export - our collective cultural capital.
In it, the Norwegian-born academic cites functionally extinct American manufacturing and the flatness of social media, among other less intuitive culprits like the impending new world order, for the decline in the soft power of “Americana”.
The allure of America writ large has long been in the story we tell ourselves, scaffolded by an imagined ideal. That projection loses its power when we stop committing to it - when legacy brands that helped define “American Cool” all but abandon it for the sake of expediency with a capital E.
It’s time we wrote a new story.
