It’s the ultimate in confidence to declare, ‘THIS is what I like (and don’t),’ writes Nathalie Atkinson.Illustration by Lauren Tamaki
Whether you’re receiving a grand gift or office Secret Santa knick-knack, nothing makes you feel more seen and understood than realizing someone has noticed your personal taste. Taste, after all, is an elusive thing to even recognize in yourself. Lately, it’s a word I’m hearing more and more again. Following years of homogenous social media content – and alongside more considered consumption habits – we’re developing a fatigue for anything indiscriminate.
It’s time to have taste again. In the algorithm era, learning to define it, to trust it, is especially rewarding. It’s the ultimate in confidence to declare, “THIS is what I like (and don’t).” It’s maybe not all that surprising that someone like me, who works in the cultural, critical realm, can articulate preferences on everything from stockpots (Dansk Kobenstyle) to pencils (Blackwing 602 firm). I probably cultivate and apply personal taste to more aspects of my life than the average person.
But everybody has a sense of taste. Children express preferences early via a favourite colour. As we age, taste is an awareness that needs to be fed, usually through a sense of curiosity about the good – and the bad. This maxim from fashion editor Diana Vreeland was part of my email signature for years: “A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika,” she wrote in her autobiography. “We all need a splash of bad taste – it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”
I don’t think I had discernible taste until I took that to heart and started trying on ideas and experiences for size, like educating your palate. I used to think taste involved some mysterious alchemy but now I understand that beauty and what I love tend to intersect through a cultural and historical lens. There’s a correlation between my personal, literary and design leanings, but I’m not sure what they are matters as much as what they do. The cross-pollination between disciplines helps with metabolizing it all. Whether it’s for my next read or a new chair, I browse expansively and shop wisely, while also sampling from other people’s tastes (recommendations from writers whose own work I admire or decorating advice doled out by mavens like Rita Konig and Paula Sutton).
Until Meta curtailed Instagram’s fully searchable hashtag feature, I spent a lot of time actively browsing art and design, following subject keywords on visuals that caught my eye, one leading into another like a nesting doll of discovery. Taste should be active like this. I’m suspicious of being passively shaped by the algorithms that already mediate our lives. I don’t take viewing suggestions from Netflix, and I eschew the feedback loop tyranny of any “For You” page. Predictive content patterned on previous behaviour narrows and reaffirms, rather than expands, the opportunity to form taste.
Like Vreeland, these days I care less about so-called “good taste” (which is really a socially constructed status anxiety about having the “right” taste) than about honing my own preferences. The dominance of understood “tasteful” brands (RH, The Row, celebrity book club picks) inhibits forming individual taste, because they’re really about safety, the type of reassuring social currency afforded by owning an original Eames chair.
I read a few hundred books a year, yet any avid reader with a teetering TBR pile should naturally become more discerning over time. Honing expertise, even if it’s only for yourself, is a thinking exercise, like discussing a book with friends or asking yourself after a museum exhibition, “What did I like, and why?” Give me the idiosyncratic answer any day.
Taste that never evolves is like being stuck with the most boring conversationalist at a cocktail party, someone who asks no questions because they lack curiosity. Inquisitiveness can also help you develop an ability for finding the redeeming qualities in just about anything. When I don’t like something, I tend to investigate why. Call it an appetite for discovery, tempered by self-awareness. There’s an omnivorous reading or browsing phase and a gathering of intel (my local library is usually involved). Knowing the story behind a clunky 1947 novel or a tufted vintage chenille bedspread usually helps me at least recognize and appreciate its qualities – even if it’s still not to my taste.
