In their new book, Chasing Cool, Noah Kerner, co-founder of Noise Marketing, and Gene Pressman, former co-CEO of Barneys, interview everyone from Tom Ford to Tiki Barber in their quest to define what it takes to stand out in today's crowded marketplace. Pulse caught up with the co-authors and asked them for a little dirt on their own too-cool-for-school pasts.

Gene, you brought a lot of new names to the United States at Barneys. Can you gives us the back story?
Barneys had a very humble beginning when it was started by my grandfather as a men's discount store. My father, Fred, came into the business in the early '50s and had a dream to elevate it into the high end. The top brands of the day didn't want to sell to him, so he began venturing to Europe to discover new manufacturers who would. Paradoxically, these became some of the great designers of the world such as Armani, Zegna and Brioni. I came into the business in the early '70s and furthered the transformation by introducing women's lines in 1975. I brought in unknown designers like Prada, Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Manolo Blahnik. The rest is history.

Did you feel pressure to conform to what other stores were selling?
We sought emerging talent to differentiate ourselves from our competition. Since we were in an out-of-the-way location on 17th Street—yes, back then this was out of the way—we needed to give customers a reason to come downtown. There will always be new talent in every generation, but, admittedly, it's finding the talent-seekers that can be difficult.

Noah, as a DJ you worked with many big names. Are there any performers who had that effortless "cool" that many aspire to?
I performed with The Roots a couple times. These guys are totally effortless and what makes them enduringly relevant is that they create quality music, take risks, keep surprising us, and stay out of the public eye so they remain in the public's imagination.

So what is it about the current generation that makes us so hard to please when it comes to finding what's "cool"?
The current generation is no different than any generation that has preceded it. There's just more fear out there today because of all the new media channels. And when there's fear, people search for a magic pill. But "creating cool" has always been the outcome of an organic process, not a manufactured strategy. Part of what made the process of writing this book so exciting was learning from the 80 people we interviewed—anecdotal stories, experiences, insider information, processes—and we try to distill the key insights in such a way that readers can extract them.

RANDOM TANGENT:
Benny Medina told the co-authors, "I use the word star very sparingly today. Quite frankly, there are a lot of celebrities, maybe even a lot of artists, but not many stars."

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