Once More, About Taste

'Taste' is not the same as 'preference', but we can still use it to discuss personal style.

A huge 1960s Baltic amber pendant in a silver and teak chain.

The topic of taste has been on the minds of a lot of personal style folks since that Ezra Klein podcast episode a few weeks ago. The premise of the discussion between Klein and his guest Kyle Chayka suggested that we (and the world’s coffee shops) are becoming more and more alike, that we don’t really know what we like anymore, that the appreciation of expertise and individual taste makers is dying, and that the algorithm is to blame. 

The podcast episode seemed like a missed opportunity to discuss the concept of taste in greater detail. Taste is a much, much bigger topic than just our personal likes and dislikes: taste is a person’s ability to recognize and judge something as good or suitable. Taste involves critical judgment and hierarchy. What follows is that you simply can’t discuss taste without the concept of class. (I highly recommend Kara V’s excellent newsletter on the topic.) Also, let’s face it: we all know that cafés and restaurants look the same everywhere because of capitalism and globalization, not because restaurateurs and coffee shop owners didn’t have taste. In his book ‘Status and Culture’ W. David Marx borrows George W. S. Trow while discussing global omnivore taste where everything goes: “nothing was judged – only counted”. That is why coffee shops all look alike. I am inclined to believe that the same fundamental issues (capitalism and globalization) lie within our inability to tap into our likes and dislikes when it comes to fashion, culture and aesthetics, and the algorithm is just a symptom of a much more serious disease.

Nevertheless, in the realm of personal style enthusiasts the Ezra Klein Show episode sparked a welcomed conversation about what it is that we really like, how to fight the algorithm, and what would we naturally veer toward if we were not influenced by the forces of social media or the society around us. It’s a topic I’ve been dabbling in, too, ever since I took a three month break from Instagram last year and found out that I’ve been influenced by social media a lot more heavily than I’d like to admit.

Derek Guy’s wonderful blog post series from 2022, ‘How To Develop Good Taste’, is a thorough, fascinating investigation into the topic of taste as it applies to personal style. As Guy points out, we currently enjoy almost limitless freedom to dress however we want. Old rules have mostly been thrown out of the window: “The ruling class may draw aesthetic inspiration from the working class, who may draw inspiration from a particular musician or artist. Cultural power is no longer just about money and bloodlines; it can bloom from merit, virtue, and talent. We also live in different cultural communities that can operate according to their own notions of taste; we don’t have to follow whatever is set by an archduke of a Vogue editor,” Guy writes. For some people the world of options is almost too much. How are you supposed to know what to wear? In the framework of all this freedom, what does taste even mean? It’s no wonder we’re drawn to Allison Bornstein’s Three Word Method or Amy Smilovic’s Tibi Style Class to make sense of how to get dressed for who we feel we are.

It’s in this context that the Ezra Klein podcast episode makes more sense, because taste then signifies personal self-expression that can be investigated, cultivated and encouraged. This idea of taste doesn’t exist outside of class or social and cultural norms, but it can be discussed and analyzed more freely. It’s not a conversation about the world, society or people, but of persona. Taste in this context is a curation of observable things for the purpose of the self to see itself, and to help others see it, too. Is it just a form of navel-gazing? Possibly. Is it enjoyable? Heck yes! It’s also a tool to help us navigate the fundamentally commercial and material world we live in, or to put it crudely, to help us spend our money wiser.

Derek Guy ends the first part of the blog post series with an excerpt from Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s book, ‘Perfumes’. In the book, Sanchez sketches out a trajectory of the path many fragrance fans take when developing their taste in perfumes, and Guy found that it mirrored his experience with clothes:

Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom

Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/ No. 5/ Miss Dior/ Tabu/ Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/ Brut/ English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.

Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté

Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/ or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.

Stage 3: Flower and candy

Phase of belief that feminine perfume should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.

Stage 4: First love

Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.

Stage 5: Decadence

An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternatively, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.

Stage 6: Enlightenment

Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves.

I thought that it would make a fun exercise to use Sanchez’s perfume trajectory and trace the path of my sense of personal taste: where did it start? What have I discovered over the years? Where am I now?

Stage 1: Mother’s walk-in closet

Clothes as dress-up, character-driven. Early experiments in the feminine, stumbling in my mother’s high heels.

Discovered: gender binary 

Stage 2: Exploration and candor

Late teens and early 20s: Clothes from the gut. Happy clothes. Showing up. Experimenting with sexuality and gender with clothes.

Discovered: flared trousers, menswear, vintage clothes

Stage 3: Consumerism 

Clothes are disposable and following trends is mandatory. What is in and what is out. Quantity over quality. 100 pairs of shoes. What is an adult woman supposed to wear? 

Discovered: lace-up flats

Stage 4: Unrequited first love

Looking at real fashion from the outside in. Frustration and feelings of exclusion. Distrust in the system. Becoming a contrarian. Experiments in imitation. 

Discovered: Dries Van Noten

Stage 5: Elaboration

Education, investigation, data, analysis, discipline. Ideology of second hand, antipathy towards anything newly produced. Leaning on the past. Quality and fit.

Discovered: second hand designer clothes

Stage 6: Balance

Instinctive dressing. Spontaneous curation. Stepping outside of the system.

Discovered: remains to be seen!

My takeaway from all of this is that taste doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a complex mix of us, our life story, and the world, with all of its complexities. We can use the notion of taste to search for and recognize our position in society and to get to know ourselves better, but it’s never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It’s an exploration without a definite destination. We simultaneously live inside and outside of our reality, looking in, looking out, in tandem.

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