Finding your personal style—for your body, for your home—is the perfect light-hearted stand-in for the slogging, uncertain work of self-actualization. Suggesting personal insight, it feels existentially productive without asking you to face your own mortality.
…taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
Complement to yesterday’s quote about taste requiring vulnerability: style is following trends instead of self-knowledge, which is needed to define personal taste.
Here, Kyle Chayka’s talking about the same lack of meaning in style trends today that Nahman points to:
Decades ago, friction was what made a subculture. You had to figure out what punk or goth was about, learn its codes, seek out compatriots, and then maybe go to Hot Topic or a hardcore show. Friction is lower online and visibility is higher.
“You May Also Like” highlights that we like things better when we actively choose them; algorithmic recommendations feed ideas to us, sublimating trends through repeated exposure (something else that influences what we like) rather than meaning or selection.
Question then: can one’s taste change along with cultural trends? I think it must since taste is social — the socially constructed meanings of things and aesthetics change or become culturally irrelevant, and with that, how we feel about them shifts too. Likewise, our identities change over time, so even taste closely linked with identity is not necessarily fixed. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as timeless taste, the same way I don’t think any book can be universally said to be “good.”
Taste is vibes, style is set dressing? Or could style be our socially mediated expression of taste — true but not Platonically so?