When taste became a credential, that’s when the sameness began.
Entire neighbourhoods started to look alike. Coffee tables displayed a specific stack of design books. Living rooms settled into a familiar colour palette. Women who had never met one another began dressing as though they shared a single wardrobe.
Somewhere between the moodboard and the mirror, having taste moved away from possession into performance. A checklist of arriving into a conversation rather than inhabiting it.
Creating a flat lay of borrowed taste references takes an afternoon.
Educating the eye takes a lifetime.
The two keep getting mistaken for one another, and that confusion is the whole problem.
What is taste?
Most of what currently gets called taste is not taste at all. It’s recognition.
Recognition is the ability to point at the right thing, follow the right people, and repeat what has already been validated by someone whose own preferences were validated by someone else before that. It travels fast, because it costs nothing. It requires no real encounter with the object itself, only familiarity with its reputation. This is why the same handful of designers or film makers now appear in everyone’s IG carousels, the same objects in everyone’s wishlist, the same references treated as a kind of shorthand for having arrived. Of course none of it is wrong to enjoy. But none of it is true authorship either.
There’s an old distinction from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that’s useful here: the difference between economic capital, what you can afford, and cultural capital, what you have actually come to understand. Recognition can be purchased. Understanding cannot. And it’s understanding, not access, that separates a life that’s been curated for an audience from a life that’s been lived with attention.
You can watch this distinction collapse in real time. A few years ago, “quiet luxury” was a genuinely thoughtful idea: wealth that didn’t need to announce itself, restraint as a form of confidence, clothing that no longer required a logo to prove its quality. Then the algorithm did what it always does to a good idea. It flattened it into a costume. Within a season, every retailer had produced its own version of the aesthetic, every feed filled with the same careful neutrals, and people who had never encountered old money in their lives were dressing as though they’d inherited an estate. What began as discernment became, almost overnight, another uniform. The irony is hard to miss: in the search for individuality, an enormous number of people ended up looking exactly alike.
Developing Taste
1 - Attention
Everyone believes their eye is simply their own. But as we’ve noted, what were drawn to is often just conditioning.
The psychologist Robert Zajonc spent decades studying what became known as the mere-exposure effect: the finding that we come to prefer things for no better reason than repeated exposure to them. Show someone the same object often enough and their brain reclassifies familiar as good, without asking permission first. Advertising has understood this for a century. The algorithm has simply perfected it, feeding you a version of yourself it has already decided you’ll respond to, then letting you mistake your agreement for instinct.
Conditioning rarely announces itself as conditioning. It arrives dressed as your own good eye.
The only real defence against it is attention, the genuine kind, not the glancing kind. The scent of orange blossom through an open window at dusk. The way particular fabrics feel under your fingertips. A piece of music that changes the emotional temperature of an ordinary hour. Nobody develops real taste by scrolling faster. It’s built by lingering longer, by noticing what actually moves you rather than what you’ve been shown enough times to assume must be moving.
2 - Relationship
Attention on its own isn’t enough. It needs somewhere to go, some accumulating relationship with the world for it to build against, or it stays a series of disconnected impressions.
This is where a real education in taste actually happens: in reading widely rather than what you’re told to read, travelling curiously rather than for the photograph, standing in front of a painting until it stops letting you walk past it, learning the names of the trees in your own garden, cooking a recipe that’s been passed down rather than trending, listening to music made in an era with no interest in your algorithm, watching a film that asks more questions than it answers, sitting across from someone whose life looks nothing at all like yours.
None of it stays separate for long. Eventually, the references begin talking to one another. Architecture changes the way you set a table. Gardens teach you patience you didn’t know you were missing. Literature deepens your capacity to imagine someone else’s interior life. This is where taste genuinely begins, not in consumption, but in the slow cross-pollination of everything you’ve actually lived through, colliding in ways nobody else’s exact combination ever could.
3 - Discernment
Attention teaches you what moves you. Relationship gives you enough of a life to draw from. Discernment is what happens when you finally ask why any of it matters at all.
The ancient Greeks had a word for the kind of life this is really in service of: eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing, though that translation undersells it. It wasn’t the accumulation of pleasant experiences, or the usual scoreboard of conventional success. It was the slow cultivation of a refined sensibility for what actually enriches a life, as distinct from what merely decorates one. Developing taste, understood properly, was never really about objects at all. It was always in service of this.
In that light, discernment isn’t simply a preference. It’s an understanding of where the preference came from, and what it reveals about what you actually value. Why this chair, and not the other. Why that particular book stays on the table long after the others have been returned to the shelf. Why the handmade bowl, slightly imperfect, matters more to you than the flawless one beside it. Discernment is what lets a life be shaped around what genuinely enriches it, rather than around whatever currently photographs well.
None of this is really about objects, aesthetics, or getting dressed. It never was. It’s about a much larger question sitting underneath all of it: how much of your life is actually yours, built from your own attention and your own relationships and your own understanding of what matters to you, and how much of it was quietly selected for you by people you’ve never met or by a moodboard that profits from your agreement.
Developing taste, in the end, isn’t decoration. It’s the discipline of living closely enough to your own life that what surrounds you actually resembles you. A garden tended for generations doesn’t announce. Neither does a life shaped by an educated eye. It simply stands there, unhurried, entirely its own.
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