Good Taste's Identity Crisis

Good taste used to signal something stable, a trained eye, a set of references, a way of distinguishing quality from noise.That stability is cracking. Algorithms now shape what looks desirable before a person consciously chooses it, and the same handful of aesthetics circulate across every feed until it becomes difficult to tell whether someone has taste or simply has an algorithm that agrees with everyone else's. 

The crisis is that taste has become harder to locate. When curation happens at the platform level, the line between personal discernment and algorithmic sorting blurs. A person can scroll through a feed that feels perfectly tailored to their sensibility and never realize the feed built that sensibility for them, rather than reflecting one they already had. 

This creates a strange loop in fashion and design specifically. Aesthetics that once took years to develop, built through galleries, archives, mentorship, and slow exposure, now form in weeks through repeated exposure to trend cycles online. The resulting taste can look sophisticated on the surface while lacking the depth that comes from sustained looking. It is fluent in references without necessarily understanding them. 

Independent designers and editorial voices sit in an interesting position here. Working outside major platforms and algorithmic amplification forces a slower, more deliberate relationship with aesthetic choices. There is no feed rewarding instant legibility, so the work has room to be specific rather than optimized for recognition. That specificity is starting to read as its own kind of taste, one defined less by consensus and more by consistency of point of view over time. 

Maybe the identity crisis is not really about whether good taste still exists. It might be about relearning how to recognize it when it is not being fed to us.