What is my taste?

Alternate question: do I even have any?

I’m a millennial gray devotee. A card carrying member of the White Kitchen Fan Club. In 2017 we moved into our house and painted nearly every single wall Benjamin Moore Owl Gray (IN MY DEFENSE the walls were all beige, so it’s not like I made them worse.) My closet is 99% black, 20% tan, and 15% gray and yes those numbers add up.

So why does every image I’ve saved on instagram lately look like this:

clockwise from top left: @swantjehinrichsen, @one.interior.mag, @glassette, @akindofhome

Is it finally happening?? Am I finally resisting the pull of trends and discovering my personal style, for the first time since, like, 7th grade when I started buying into trends?

No, of course not. Something else is going on, and it has little to do with me. I can’t quite explain it, but even though the physical spaces I go to — the houses, restaurants, and coffeeshops — are still sparse and white and subway tiled, something online is shifting and it’s slowly being pushed out to me. I’m sure if I saw a colorful kitchen a few years ago, I rolled my eyes and said “ew kitchens are white get a clue” but as more and more of them popped up on my radar, they started to feel more acceptable. Now, I crave them. (But! If I were renovating a kitchen today, I wouldn’t dare pick something colorful. I’ve been burned by too many trends, and I know that whatever I choose today that feels fresh and current and “my style” will feel dated and “so 2024” in 3 to 5 to 7 years.¹)

This just drives home something I’ve long feared about myself, actually: that I have no taste.

Not that I have bad taste. Just — nothing I like really reflects me.

A few days after I started writing this, something popped up in my podcast feed: “How to Discover Your Own Taste,” an episode of The Ezra Klein Show where he interviews Kyle Chayka, the author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” A few hours later, that episode was all over my Instagram feed; the next day, it popped up in Substacks alongside links to similar recent pieces.

Are you fucking kidding me? I thought. Do I not have one original thought??? Even my long suspected secret fear about the way I consume trends is a trend.

I listened to the podcast. I bought the book. It’s so validating: In one chapter, Chayka writes about exactly what I’m describing above using the example of coffeeshops:

“When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.”

I’m stuck in a cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation² and I want out. I want to figure out what the fuck I actually like. My neglected Substack seems like a great place for this project. Maybe you want to join me? I have a lot of ideas, including:

• analyzing the trends I’ve fallen for and the ones I haven’t (why did I embrace the 2012 bubble necklace enthusiastically, but couldn’t get into coastal Grandma?).

• making art?

• going through my ten-year-old Domino Magazine collection and seeing what, if anything, still speaks to me.

• parsing out what music I actually like versus what music I’ve gaslighted myself into thinking I like because some boy liked it in 2003.

• going to museums, open houses, estate sales and paying attention to what catches my eye

• musing on things I loved before an algorithm (or a popular mean girl) told me what to think

• getting inspired by old design books

• and coming later this week, a softball: my favorite books of 2023 and how they fit into my taste (I think I actually might have my taste in books figured out.)
  
  For today, as I am an aspiring journal girlie,³ I decided to set a timer and see how many trends I could write down that I’ve live-laugh-loved through. You should try this! Let me know if you do.

  

  
  
  Here are some other takes on taste and style that have had me nodding recently:
  

• Ashley C. Ford on How Poverty Makes It Hard to Figure Out What You Like from

  Big Salad
  
  
  ”For a long time, I thought it was a superpower to not have preferences. When you grow up in poverty, there’s nothing in your mind that says, Even though I can’t get these things, I’m still worthy of them. The protective approach you develop is to NOT want anything.”

• “What’s Good Taste Anymore?” from

  Vik's Busy Corner

  “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).”

• Taking Style Inspiration and Making It Your Own from

  Earl Earl by Laurel Pantin

  
  ”Last week, I was talking to someone and described my style and aesthetic preferences as Connecticut Dad in the 80s. A human version of a vintage LL Bean catalog, 80s volvo, prep distilled through the lens of practicality rather than status. More or less, Charles Grodin in Beethoven. Beethoven’s dad, essentially.”
  

• Most things Allison Bornstein, but particularly this podcast episode.

1. This is why I’ve been trying to pick out new light fixtures for literally 5 years.

2. I’m British now

3. the algorithm made me say it