Taste isn't personal

On the futility of trying to find your own taste.

The Ezra Klein podcast with Kyle Chayka, “How to discover your own taste” is making the rounds on fashion Substack. January has us, chronic shoppers and fashion lovers, doing a hard 75 challenge, cleaning out our closets, finding our adjectives, and creating various piles of keep/toss/style. It also seems like the extremely online are starting to wonder if we’ve all been hypnotized by Ssense models. What do we want? Who looks good? Why is everyone under 35 dressing like a grandma (or is it now a mob wife)? Liza Belmonte gives an excellent rundown on the ways social media and the fashion industry collide in our closets. Lessons on finding your personal style have become a cottage industry across most platforms, especially this one. And, to be honest, I am down for all of it. What ARE my adjectives?

Back to the podcast. Chayka is making the rounds to promote his new book, which I haven’t read, on the ways social media and algorithms bring about a cultural homogeneity. Spending any amount of time online, you can’t help but see how easy it is to be influenced, and this makes it harder to know what you even like.

Yet, the discussion between Klein and Chayka misunderstands the social function taste serves. In the podcast, Kyle describes taste:

Style or taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.

I mean, it’s a process of collection, almost. Like you’re grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You’re drawn to something without knowing why.

Hearing this made my sociologist eyes roll back in my head. Yes, taste may be knowing what you like, and what feels good to you, but that knowing comes from somewhere and, for sociologists, that comes from our class, a word that captures, roughly, our social, cultural, and economic contexts.

Same, Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu’s research centered around how people in different economic classes use taste to separate themselves from each other, and notably how upper classes use taste to exclude others from their worlds and, more importantly, their resources. Taste, according to Bourdieu in his 1979 book Distinction, “classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” In other words, taste is less about “knowing who you are” (Chayka) and more a mechanism to “distinguish [our]selves by the distinctions [we] make,” (Bourdieu). Taste cannot exist outside of our social worlds and interactions therein. Our ‘tastes’ first and foremost betray a specific class position, a relation to the world based on wealth, experiences, education, or lack thereof. In societies that push the myth of class mobility, taste offers a quiet way to uphold class boundaries.

Beyond being labeled “mid,” we can see how taste is used to discriminate when, say, a person does not get a job because they are not perceived to be a good ‘fit.’ ‘Fit’ is often code for a misalignment of taste, ie class. Not sharing the same ‘taste’ operates as a way for those with power to discredit candidates who may have the qualifications but not the upper class/professional markers (golfing, clothing, food preferences, music, address, university) as expressed through taste. This is also an obvious way racial discrimination persists.

Once you see taste in this way, it’s difficult to see it as some inherent force that some people have and others do not, or as something that can be cultivated at will. Everyone has ‘taste’: we all know what we like, and we all judge those around us on their expressions of taste. An easy way to grasp taste is to consider what you find revolting. I recently returned a pair of boots, highly touted on TikTok, because I feared they read too “Christian Girl Autumn”, a social milieu I read as cringe.

What makes some appear to have ‘good taste’ is that they are able to express, and reflect, a social position and context that resonates with others¹. I’d even argue that Taylor Swift’s bad fashion taste is cultivated to appeal to the widest swath of classes and contexts. If she only wore The Row (oh gosh, lol, see footnote #2!) sure, she might get recognition, ie be deemed to have ‘good taste’, from fashion editors. But that might not translate to the many other groups that make up her fanbase².

Again, I haven’t read Chayka’s book but from the podcast with Klein, I’m hearing a relatively privileged class upset that when they travel internationally all the coffee shops look the same. Using Bourdieu’s concept of taste, I interpret their disappointment coming from the fact that travel does not as easily offer them the same kind of class-based distinction it used to.

I get this, I worry about the homogenization of cultural spaces too and the ways social media impacts how we experience the physical world. At the same time, it’s gross to hear two white guys with cushy, creative jobs that have them traveling to “Tokyo or LA or Berlin or Beijing” complain they are not able to experience exotic locales or “new experiences” anymore because of the scandi-minimalist coffee shops.

Digital media upsets their former class based distinctions, and travel is only one example. I also heard a (uniquely male?) condescension of social media spaces, which reads as a gendered devaluation of a highly feminine labor. In the conversation, Klein and Chayka seem to revel in the feeling that curation has lost meaning. This quote in particular captures a certain gendered devaluation towards social media:

And when we say curator right now on Instagram, for example, I just don’t think it has that same connotation of caretaking and responsibility. So I think when I think about the value of curation, it’s not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I feel like that’s been lost on the contemporary internet.

I’m not sure what internet he’s looking at, but from Substack writers, Instagram accounts, and even TikTokers I see a wide variety of education on various cultural products, histories and movements. I mean, the style class videos Tibi puts out weekly are deep dives into context, color, and proportion. There is so much care and painstaking labor happening on social media. They seem blind to the “vast amounts of labor” most influencers put in³

And of course algorithms are doing all kinds of messed up stuff, causing serious harm and suffering. Coffee shop homogeneity isn’t on the top ten list.

Reflecting on recent online fascination and proliferation with ‘how to find your taste’ primers, I can’t stop thinking about one of covid’s symptoms was a loss of taste. Collectively, we momentarily lost our ability to express our social taste too. Being cut off from all social situations, forced to live and work online, we were temporarily unable to fully signal our style, and to easily classify the taste of those around us. Zoom rooms, black screens, thumbnails do not as efficiently convey the things, macro and micro, that signal taste (ie class)⁴.

If anything, digital media has us scrambling to figure out how to reassert our social positions, and dominance for the privileged, via taste.

1. Minh-Ha Pham uses Bourdieu’s idea of taste to uncover the mid-aught ascendance of the super Asian fashion bloggers. She details how the Western luxury fashion industry had a fleeting ‘taste’ for Asian fashion bloggers because of numerous converging factors including: the Western Recession of 2008 and the need to capture Asian luxury fashion markets, the hope digital media would democratize the cultural industries, and the desire to appear ‘post racial’. All of these larger structural winds impacted who was deemed, by the fashion elite, to have ‘taste’.

2. https://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/taylor-swift-cashmere-dress-the-row/ Ha, well it looks like she did since I wrote this!

3. See, for starters, “Having it all on social media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers” by Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund, Social Media and Society, July (2015) 1-11.

4. This is not to say class, and taste, was not conveyed via online lockdown as ‘rate your room/zoom background’ accounts proliferated. And, of course, public school teachers quickly attuned to the ways Zoom rooms did create new norms of class signaling as some kids did not have their own rooms, their own computers, or even a quiet place.