About

Old School Cool is an internet slang term referring to pictures of people from the late 20th century that are particularly stylish by modern standards. The term was popularized by the subreddit /r/oldschoolcool before spreading to other parts of the internet.

Origin

On April 21st, 2012, Redditor Apaz created /r/oldschoolcool.^[1] In the span of six months, the subreddit had grown to over 30,000 subscribers.^[2] The subreddit's description reads as such:

History's cool kids, looking fantastic!
A pictorial and video celebration of history's coolest kids, everything from beatniks to bikers, mods to rude boys, hippies to ravers. And everything in between.
If you've found a photo, video, or photo essay of people from the past looking fantastic, here's the place to share it.

The subreddit also includes some rules. For example, all pictures posted must be over 25 years old, and the year or decade must be posted in the title of the post. All posts must feature a person. As of August 30th, the top post on the subreddit was posted on August 25th, 2017, and is titled "My Grandmother, a white Jewish woman, looked like Barack Obama in 1962." The post has over 103,000 points (shown below).

Spread

On September 19th, 2014, Buzzfeed^[3] published an article compiling pictures from the subreddit. On February 21st, 2017, Urban Dictionary ^[4] user Guitar_Guru uploaded a definition of "old school cool" to the website (shown below).

On August 30th, 2017, a thread was posted to /r/OutOfTheLoop inquiring "Whats going on with /r/OldSchoolCool ?"^[5] as apparently people had begun shitposting in the subreddit with video game and movie screenshots. The post gained over 130 points, but all offending posts in /r/oldschoolcool appear to have been deleted.

Elsewhere Online

The concept of "Old School Cool" has appeared in some other corners of the internet. Tumblr's "Old School Cool" tag^[6] features posts in a similar vein to that of the subreddit. On August 24th, 2017, All That Is Interesting^[7] posted a gallery of photos compiled from Tumblr and /r/oldschoolcool. There are over 79,000 posts with the hashtag "#oldschoolcool" on Instagram as well.^[8]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References