A matter of taste
“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing...the enemy of creativeness!” So said Picasso. But what does taste even mean? And, asks Kathryn Madden, are we losing the ability to cultivate our own?
Lol. Omg. Hold up, do you really listen to Mariah Carey? Like unironically
Maybe. I mean, is it possible to listen to Mariah Carey unironically?
And wait, there’s a lot of neo soul and dance pop. Like, a LOT. You OK?
Let me guess, you’ve been to Coachella.
Well, yes, but it was pre-Revolve Festival.
I can tell. It’s giving put-it-into-speed-drive-mum-and-dads-date-night-smug-Hamilton-stan bad.
That seems a little harsh. And inaccurate.
Sexy-cat-in-Cats-flop bad. Manic-pixie-dream-girl-bad. Women-of-a-certain-age-obsessed bad.
Now you’re getting personal. What music do you like?
Based on your listening habits, you are 17 per cent basic.
Well, that’s 83 per cent not basic. A respectable B. Less basic than most?
I guess the important thing is that your music makes you feel good.
Shutting down. I need to recalibrate my taste levels.
There are few things in life more terrifying than having your music taste laid bare and blared through metaphorical speakers, especially when a shady AI bot is mining your Spotify account and shaming your choices. But that’s the vulnerable state I’ve succumbed to in the name of a deep-dive on matters of taste.(1)
Defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the flavour of something’ or ‘a thing a person likes’, taste actually stands for more than that; it’s deeply personal and often innate, a curation of who we are, an outward expression of our most inner selves. It’s your collection of mismatched mid-century dining chairs; your predilection for Nordic noir; the briny, salty anchovies you eat straight from the jar; the Late 2000s Emo Forever playlist you secretly blast when you have the house to yourself.(2) Since the ancient days of Plato, and maybe even earlier, philosophers and thought-leaders have tried to define the enigma that is taste – without any particularly conclusive findings except that taste is, indeed, enigmatic. De gustibus non est disputandum! The Latin maxim suggests there’s no accounting for taste. In other words, one person’s Brad Pitt is another person’s Brad Pitt.
A random survey for this story amassed an array of delicious responses on the highs and lows of taste, all subjective but equally forthright. Good taste is good-quality olive oil, nice jumpers and a stack of (good) books on a bedside table. What constitutes the good or the nice, here, is the unknown quantity. “As a rule of thumb, I think shoes are the ultimate taste signifier. Good shoes equal good taste, questionable shoes equal questionable taste. It almost never fails,” said one respondent. Recommending a restaurant that’s not particularly fancy or expensive is tasteful (because you don’t feel the need to prove you have taste); recommending a restaurant you’ve seen on TikTok is not. Good taste is wearing clothes that are intentionally oversized; cultivating an appetite for art; pronouncing designer names correctly; shopping vintage and not bragging about it(3); reading things and not bragging about them. “These days, I think that there’s an overlap with personal taste and original taste, where your viewpoint or interpretation of things can be a bit out there or unique and still be deemed in good taste,” was a widely shared sentiment. “For example, Chloë Sevigny or Mary-Kate Olsen.” Alexa Chung, Joan Didion, Julia Fox, Jenny Kee, Greta Lee, Fran Lebowitz, Miuccia Prada, Sarah Jessica Parker and Solange were all also name-checked as enviable figures in the game of taste.(4)
Bad taste, on the other hand, is sitting inside at a restaurant on a nice day, worse if it’s a chain restaurant, worse again if you order a frozen margarita and pull out a logo-brandished wallet to pay. “I’m starting to wonder if I’m a giant judgemental bitch,” lamented one respondent after waxing lyrical on her personal signifiers of poor taste: dresses paired with white sneakers (“specifically Nike Air Force 1s”), saying “let’s learn a TikTok dance” and raving that “the burrata is so good here!”. The chef at your trendy Italian haunt, dear reader, did not invent nor make that milky ball of cheese you just paid $19 for.(5)
That’s the thing about taste – it’s long been linked to snobbery, tied inextricably to social class with a Sandy Liang bow. (Although can an adornment so pervasive epitomise high taste? More likely it’s fastened with an antique sapphire brooch.) Traditionally, the elite establish the rules of good taste; once the middle class and masses catch on, the goalposts shift and good taste is redefined to maintain the distinction between high and low.
These notions seem at once archaic and timely, so I enlist the expertise of William Hanson(6), British etiquette coach and professional authority on good taste (“I’m highly strung and British, and was born with the priceless ability to politely call out distasteful actions and objects,” he replies when asked what makes him worthy of such a title). According to Hanson, bad taste is “anything pretending to be something it isn’t, such as artificial grass; it’s either grass or it isn’t”. Timber veneer. Luxury dupes. Frauds like Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes and Donald Trump. Good taste, while historically a birthright, Hanson continues, is something that can be learnt with dedication (and the somewhat surprising knowledge that taste should never be taken too seriously). Though what does he make of the rise of so-bad-it’s-good taste, of Australia’s own mullet, and the Croc, which have transcended from crass to crassly cool? “These are generally very distasteful unless sported in an ironic way, which I assume everyone is doing in Australia,” he says. “Crocs, for example, are useful if you are going to and from the pool house. They’re fine there. But wearing them into the office or to a party is very common. There, I said it.”
But are a pair of Italian leather loafers innately superior? Or a classic three-striped sneaker worn by every cool kid and their PM?(7) What about the quote by Pablo Picasso declaring that taste is the enemy of creativity? “This is perhaps a bit rich coming from a serial philanderer and misogynist,” Hanson deadpans.
Not excusing his misdemeanours, Picasso wasn’t alone in his distaste for taste. Salvador Dalí called it the first handicap to any creative functioning and Dame Edith Sitwell, poet and critic, described it as “the worst vice ever invented”. And yet while these brilliant minds baulked at good taste, a codeword for everything unimaginative and boring, it’s a concept that the rest of us seem to be clamouring for. It’s why the quiet luxury and old money aesthetics took over last year, defined by all the traditional trappings of good taste: affluence, elegance, understated neutrals only. You could buy, or perform, good taste with a cream cashmere cardigan – extra points if you threw it over your shoulders like a coastal grandmother. The Generic Coffee Shop(8) continued to breed and multiply, and brand logos were officially blandified.(9) And even since the vibe has shifted to a messier, quirkier, more colourful existence, homogenisation endures. The same TikTok song (and dance) is stuck in everyone’s head. The same not-cashmere cardie(10) is so ubiquitous it set off a social media war. The same tomato candles and Matisse prints ‘personalise’ bedrooms. Maybe it’s not the Croc that should be at the centre of any discussion about personal taste, but the Adidas Samba.
"We're OBSCURED by what we see on the internet. You see the SAME PAIR of shoes 30 times and start to think they're ACTUALLY CUTE.”
One of the most compelling stories of the pandemic came when COVID patients started to report a loss of taste and smell. Overnight, the rich aromas of a cup of coffee evaporated; a bowl of spicy Sichuan noodles may as well have been a bowl of cardboard. Forums and Facebook groups filled with strangers commiserating on their sense blindness – an affliction relatively trivial yet deeply significant. What if their olfactory function never came back? Could life still be pleasurable without inhaling Christmas tree pines or tasting spoonfuls of Nutella?
For Mandy Aftel, it probably wouldn’t. Scent is not only her livelihood as the founder of natural, artisanal perfumery Aftelier Perfumes, but a way of life. “I think I’m a really sensual person; I greet the world through my senses,” she says. “I always have and I love smells, even weird, funky ones. I think smells are the eighth wonder of the world. I’m always smelling whether I’m gardening or cooking; I love the information you personally get in your body through scent.” The 76-year-old, who concocts fragrances(11) from her home in Berkeley, California, speaks poetically about the “dreamy, almost translucent” scent of Blue Lotus essential oil, a symbol of sexuality in Ancient Egypt, and Choya Nakh, distilled roasted seashells reminiscent of a beach campfire. Every Saturday, she opens up the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, an olfactory museum of sorts, to visitors.(12) The experience is a lesson in honing personal taste. “I never give customers questionnaires, like: do you like cashmere or silk or do you want to go to Paris or the Amazon?” Aftel says, noting that these are superficial indicators of taste. Instead, she gives each entrant 50 objects and oils to sniff and react to. “When they’re smelling things I sometimes see them look to me, a little concerned as to whether they’ll get it right. I see that as a residue of the wine world where people think there’s a right and a wrong. But I’m not into that. Whatever they say is perfect. I think our sense of smell is connected to who we are as animals.” A person who’s falling in love or grieving, she continues, will likely be drawn to different scents. And everyone smells things differently. The likelihood, then, that all the girlies actually love the same trendy viral fragrance is slim. I confess to Aftel that earlier this year I bought a perfume off TikTok. Well, I smelt it first, after stumbling on it in a Japanese concept store; I’m not a complete heathen. But it was my memory of a social media video – proclaiming this was an obscure and hard-to-get scent that would have me basking in not only rich sandalwood but compliments – which spurred me to pick it up and purchase it. Had I unwittingly become a victim of taste blindness myself?(13)
“I think different people like different things, right?” says Ione Gamble, editor-in-chief of Polyester zine.(14) “It’s why we have different friendship groups, different interests and do different jobs. But I feel like we’re now being convinced that everything’s more monosyllabic than it is because of Instagram; we all follow the same accounts, we all see the same interiors. Trend culture is on a level that we’ve never had before and it’s not really segregated into different communities – lots of people see the same content. But I think when it comes down to it, you know what you like when you walk into a shop, but we’re obscured by what we see on the internet. You see the same pair of shoes 30 times and start to think, ‘Oh actually, they’re cute.’ But we should be trying to unpack that. Do we actually like something or do we just see it so many times that we begin to think we like it?”
Gamble founded her zine from her bedroom floor, guided by a quote by filmmaker John Waters: “Have faith in your own bad taste.”(15) It was 2014, she was studying fashion journalism and Phoebe Philo-era Celine-coded minimalism was upheld as the epitome of taste. “I was seeing a lot of young feminist artists, designers and early influencers who were opposing that aesthetic but weren’t getting recognition. I thought it was a really good quote to summarise the fact that so often we’re told not to like the things we’re naturally drawn to… So much of what we talk about in relation to taste is actually about class, race, gender, all of these things, and good taste exists to uphold a status quo that is privileged… With Polyester, I want to encourage people to scratch away at those ideas and find out what it is they actually like.” But what happens when you start to lose trust in what you like, your senses dulled by the never-ending scroll? And when you’re overwhelmed by recommendation culture, or is it the recommendation culture industrial complex? For Gamble, it’s about really zoning out, then back in, on her personal preferences. “It’s like, ‘Oh, everyone’s suddenly doing the skinny eyebrow, do I actually like it or is it because I’ve seen it on Gabbriette?’ And it’s also just doing things because I want to, not because I feel like I should. Maybe one night I want to binge 12 Real Housewives episodes, and do that for two weeks. But then I’ll watch an elite Apple TV+ show. It’s about not delineating between those two as high-brow or trashy(16), as good or bad.”
Cultivating your taste can also be as simple as stopping and smelling the roses (Aftel has more than a 100 different varieties in her garden at the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents). “In your everyday life, just smell things,” she says. “Pick a rose, crush it in your hand and smell it. Then close your eyes and start to think of words that are descriptive, with no right or wrong. It could be fruity, it could be spicy, it could be your grandmother, it could be an old desk… Smell can be meditative, it can really take you there. You just have to let go of any judgement.”
It’s a metaphor for reconnecting with your personal taste17, getting back to those animal instincts, preferably one sense at a time. Listening while we’re cooking and watching while we’re eating and scrolling while we’re watching can leave us numb to the beauty all around. Instead, remove your noise-cancelling headphones when you step out into the world. Go to more films and galleries and live concerts, rip pages from magazines and create old-school collages, write lists of things you love and hate, collect intuitively the things that make your heart sing, the things that make you you. Developing our specific tastes, a discerning sense of who we are, will become more important than ever in the age of AI, as robots are pitted against human originality.
“Do you remember, a number of years ago, that summer when everyone was wearing the same Zara dress?”18 Gamble asks. The black-and-white polka dot trapeze dress, more a frumpy nightie by today’s standards, was not just an early viral sensation but a real-life meme spreading around the streets in almost dystopian fashion. It embodied the flattening of taste before we started talking about it, hinting at a more serious crime than bad taste: no taste. “I think to have no taste is to not care about the world around you,” says Gamble. “It’s to have no curiosity.”
And that – curiosity – may be the most compelling interpretation of taste yet. Sarah Jessica Parker has it; Joan Didion exuded it (so much so, The Economist dubbed her particular strain “radical curiosity”); and Fran Lebowitz’s is spliced with a conviction to go against the grain. “About one third of people in the street in New York City have a yoga mat. That alone would keep me from yoga,” she said in the 2021 Netflix series Pretend it’s a City. Though she also once mused, “I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses.” Such is the burden of possessing impeccable taste.
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