What's "Good Taste" Anymore?

Feeling jaded in the sea of tastemakers, Google Doc Guides, shopping newsletters, and million dollar companies that cosplay as "local" and "small"

When I first moved to New York, I was sure I had good taste. I had practically no money for the majority of my early twenties, so I was very thoughtful and creative about the things I consumed. When the first full-time salary checks started hitting my bank account, I could finally afford to expand my palate: live in a cool neighborhood, dine at nice restaurants, and buy the clothes I’ve been drooling over online. Nothing was going to hold me back from becoming the prettiest and the most cultured girl to ever walk these streets! Alas, the extra money, the exposure to countless “tastemakers”, and the desire to fit into a new place, yet stand out from the crowd only made things worse. And a couple of years into getting the good paychecks, trotting around the best city in the world, and diving deep into internet rabbit holes in search for one-of-a-kind things, I feel so jaded that can’t even tell you what “good taste” is anymore, let alone have any confidence in my own.

What confuses me isn’t the big media pushing mediocre products and empty culture trends through listicles and clickbait. The industry is in trouble and they’ve got revenue and traffic numbers to make! I am also pretty good at differentiating between people who try to have some sort of taste, and those who consume fashion, restaurant recs, and culture bits directly off their fyp. I don’t mind that either, it’s just if you don’t deeply care about anything, I don’t know how we can possibly connect. What worries me the most is that even the people who put more than average effort and intention into what and how they consume can still end up as accidental fashion victims and rep some mediocre things.

Good taste is elusive, but it seems like part of the deal is being able to find cool stuff that’s new or rare before it catches on. So, trying to one up your online peers, you put your phone down and venture out in the wild, looking for something “local”, “raw” and “small”. You pick up a bottle of fresh apple cider at a farmers market and impulse buy a funky candle shaped like a salami at a small neighborhood gift shop. Discovering these things out of context, you don’t realize that your local farmer is also a supplier at Whole Foods and that cute little candle you picked out is also stocked at the MoMA Design Store (the brand that makes it has 92k followers on IG btw). It’s not your fault. There is a whole business genre that wants you to feel like a special kind of person who has an eye for new and special things, even though in reality, you are one of thousands of people they market to - through TikTok, IG ads and big retailers to some and farmers markets, bodegas and private events to others.

But maybe, you beat the algorithm and the savvy business teams. You fish for clothing recs exclusively in Substack chats of shopping newsletters where sponsored ads can’t get you yet. You click through to websites that look like library archives from Kaitlin Phillips’s gift guide written in a Google Doc. You pick estheticians exclusively from beauty Black Books forwarded to your on Gmail. But just because someone put you onto something by writing it on the back of a napkin rather than making a TikTok, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a tasteful rec. Maybe that writer recommending a €380 Chinese soup bowl as a Christmas gift is looking to stand out or maybe they are fucking with you because they are bored. That C-list downtown actress putting you on a massage parlor in a beauty Black Book looks kind of busted and tired all the time. And ultimately, the girls who shop on eBay and rep vintage Celine would die for a nice coat from The Row just like the rest of us. What all these niche curations offer is certainly an entertaining read and options, but taste-wise it’s hard to tell what’s good, what’s a friendly promo, and what’s a sign of a deeply rooted insecurity.

I noticed that a lot of people I’ve been looking up to taste-wise are familiar enough for me to understand but different enough to intrigue me. And if you are a young person moving to a big vibrant city, like New York, this definition of taste can cause a bit of a mindfuck. Of course you want to eat at all the right restaurants, dress in all the right brands, and go to all the right functions because getting called a transplant just like the idiots who get their bagels scooped, feels like the absolute worst insult when you so badly want to belong. The issue is that I am pretty sure everyone in New York acts like they have the best taste because they were either born and raised here or are among the few lucky ones who came here from their home town and made it big. And unless you are a freak who moves here being 99% confident in your identity, you can bounce around from one set of role models to the one that’s slightly hotter, funnier, and smarter, and therefore a little more intriguing, and never fully settle for quite a long time.

Having role models whose identities are quite different from yours can be a beautiful thing though. Personally, I’ve realized that my favorite people to follow are old-school fashion bloggers, like

Leandra Medine Cohen

, menswear guys, like Throwing Fits, and style and culture writers, like Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie of

Blackbird Spyplane

and their featured guests. Because they are in such different phases of their lives than I am, I don’t project my own identity and insecurities onto their choices and can enjoy their taste without feeling tempted to straight up copy it. Also, all of them put out longer-format content where they share how they think and as a byproduct, teach me how to think instead of giving me a visual to copy or selling me on their favorite brands. But look, if I see a pair of nice loafers or pants in the process, I might just get them.

In the end of the day, is it funny, smart, hot people that make things cool or is it cool things that make people look smart, funny and hot? Do you have to first think of someone as cool to trust a city guide they put together in a Google Doc? Or do you need to know the last ten places they dined at to decide if they are cool? I don’t know but honestly, does it even matter? Tell me all why you keep going to that French restaurant in the Village that serves mediocre food! Tell me about why you think brown corduroy pants are the new jeans! Tell me why you love playing poker with your boring finance boyfriend and his buddies on a Friday night! As long as you are genuine and passionate about why you like your stuff, you are probably more interesting than the people who sweat about liking the right stuff.

More thoughts on good taste:

• Alex Delany in

  Sprezza
  :
  “We’re not missing originality. We probably have too much of that. I’d say quality is missing. I want something good over something unique. I also want something for *me* instead of something for everyone (which should be everyone’s goal!).”
  → Read
  

• James Jung
  about Alex Delany in
  The Supersonic
  :
  “Like, I just want to be the person with the best taste, period,” Delany says, and for such a bold statement it somehow doesn’t smack of arrogance. Maybe it’s the mop of auburn hair and matching scruff, dappling the handsome, 31-year-old face that’s broad and open, his affability all right there in a conspiratorial grin that conveys how psyched he is to be breaking bread with you in such a “sick” spot, plus an eagerness to take you into this world you just need to know about, dude. “If you know what wine to order but you don't know anything about literature or film or whatever, then you only did half the work, right? To me, taste is all-encompassing. Or it should be at least. Today, with everything being so immediate and trend-focused, I think there's this lack of patience and commitment to developing your taste. I think people lose sight of a totality, right? Like if you're really getting everything from life, you're getting everything.”

  → Read

• Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post:
  ”The idea that you might like something because it’s unusual, or because your well-trained eye recognizes something no one else can, is almost foreign to many shoppers in their 20s and 30s.”

  → Read

• Alexandra Hildreth
  on Twitter:

  “No h8 to the creator I get what she’s saying but it’s a great example of how influencers have shifted the landscape of what “people” look like day to day— is a fashion writer’s image more important than their knowledge or the quality of work that they put out?”

  → See