#176: Accounting for taste
On the perilous pursuit of personal style
The other day, I was folding my orange checkerboard hand towels when I was struck by the realization—the memory, actually—that I didn’t like the pattern. I’d been searching for this feeling for years. I knew it lurked somewhere within me because in 2018, before checkerboard became the pattern of the moment, my friend wore a checkerboard sweater and I’d thought: That looks like a race-car flag. But soon enough, as the pattern proliferated across the internet in photos of charming interiors and on cult indie retail sites like Paloma Wool and Lisa Says Gah, my Nascar association faded, replaced by something more elevated, whimsical, and cool.
When I moved into my current apartment, I’d badly wanted a checkerboard rug, and yet I resisted, afraid of purchasing something so consequential that had recently reminded me of patriotic trucker hats and cars on fire. But I wondered if my fear was outdated. At that moment, I could no better imagine disliking checkerboard than I could imagine disliking chocolate. In fact, the pattern—its geometric rigor combined with its playful possibilities vis-a-vis scale and color—seemed like it spoke to my specific tastes.
Last year, when I saw someone online predict that checkerboard would eventually go the way of chevron in the 2010s, a pattern I’d once loved and now hated, I was alarmed at how accurate this sounded and surprised it had no bearing on my affection. And so I started pausing every so often to regard my towels and check whether the tide had finally turned. I’d try to summon my previous disinterest and find, over and over, that it was gone. Until suddenly, last week, there it was: a flash of my prior truth. Out of nowhere, my towels once again conjured the spirit of Hot Wheels. They’ve since become my private Rorschach; sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t.
This is the well-known risk of following trends: what you find attractive one day becomes ugly the next, ad infinitum. There is a facile understanding of trend following, which is that people dispassionately chase trends to buy themselves social acceptance, and then the more complicated one, which is that repeated exposure to certain qualities in new contexts can inform and reform our genuine tastes. Jonah Weiner describes this mind-warp in his recent journey down the pants rabbithole for The Times: “Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging.”
There’s something alluring about surrendering to the trend tides and letting yourself be guided, wallet first, toward aesthetic absolution. 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. At what time, in the history of humankind, has such a pursuit been more accessible and habit-forming? There are millions of ways to answer the call for stylishness. How you do it might say so much about you. More, even, than you have to say yourself.
There’s a longtime fashion blogger I’ve kept up with over the years who’s made a personality out of her pursuit of personal style. Leaping from aesthetic to aesthetic, her closet a conveyor belt of new clothes, she consistently performs the confidence of someone who knows what she likes, but without continuity, depth, or verve, which in the end transmits a certain hollowness. Incidentally, her online presence posits a riddle: If your style is meant to help you express your priorities, and your priorities exclusively concern being stylish, what does your style express? Can clothes express…clothes?
I think of her often. She happens to hit on a particular fixation of mine, which is the problem of “taste” as an ever-present commodity, rather than something idiosyncratic, personal, and most importantly, connected to other aspects of your day-to-day life, like how you move around the world and what you do to pass the time. I think of people whose style, in stark contrast to the blogger’s, is generally informed by their lifestyle: a dancer in baggy activewear, a carpenter in double-knee pants, a librarian in a cozy cardigan. It’s satisfying to see clothes demonstrating their purpose or cultural context so directly. These people remind me that taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
In 2022, I wrote about Emma Chamberlain’s AD home tour, the virality of which demonstrated, to me, a waning interest in time as a quality of personal style. Filled with expensive new things that reflected her proclivities (many of which I shared) at the tender age of 21, her home lacked any sign of patina: the worn-in quality of perspectives earned and life lived. After watching Emma’s tour, I reacquainted myself with a different way, care of a junky-interiors book I found from 2011, which made decorating seem so much more fun for me. Lately, I’ve been trying to achieve the same mindset shift with my closet.
It’s with that lesson in mind that I’ve begun to consider the possibility that the constant acquisition of new clothes can actually make your style worse. We’ve heard the moral and ethical consequences of over-consumption, but I suspect there are aesthetic ones, too. The other day I walked past a woman wearing a red cotton jacket that I initially admired and then realized I used to own in a different color. I’d sold it during one of my many fugue-fueled closet cleanouts because it hadn’t fit my mood at the time, a mood I mistakenly assumed, like the checkerboard one, was more permanent than it was. At the time I probably saw the elimination as evolved and creatively restrained. Now I wonder what it might have been like to keep the jacket around for reinterpretation. To commit to my original attraction to it and get creative with how I wore it rather than assuming I needed something new.
There’s a modern phenomenon whereby personal style—on the body, in the home—is understood as a separate track of identity. It’s a mode of expression we’re meant to perfect through mimetic desire and buying the right stuff. I’m thinking, for instance, of dressing like a “coastal grandma,” without otherwise inhabiting the relevant lifestyle choices. This ignores the likelihood that the most interesting part of the coastal grandma isn’t the clothes, but the woman (grandma, coastal) who understands herself and follows through on that consistently for years. What can we learn from her?
“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” Guy Debord once said, of our descent into a postmodern society of signs and symbols. Always the ones dressing like coastal grandmas, never the coastal grandmas ourselves. While I don’t think it sounds realistic or even interesting to drain modern aesthetics of reference, I think it’s worth admiring what happens when style springs, instead, from the creative fulfillment of real needs: Japanese Hakama pants that can be tied to fit different size bodies and protect legs underneath kimonos; Breton-striped sweaters so that sailors could be more easily spotted should they fall overboard; fisherman beanies folded up to cool the ears on shore. These designs have endured for a reason.
Today, if we only concerned ourselves with utility, most of us would look pretty boring, something akin to a Silicon Valley tech CEO in cheap cotton t-shirts and performance sneakers. We shop, now, to reject that. In her book Worn: A people’s history of clothing, Sofi Thanhouser points out that the monotony of modern work shares a historical link with mass consumption. In the early 20th century, around the rise of assembly-line manufacturing, “American advertising worked explicitly to transmute the dissatisfaction of the working class away from social reform, and toward consumerism. Gratification that used to come from meaningful work could now be purchased.”
Sometimes I feel this acutely—the sense that the time and energy I put toward honing my aesthetic perspective might be better used, and more rewarding, if directed elsewhere. But I don’t think it’s zero-sum. I think there’s a lot of depth to be found in the pursuit of beauty, I just think we tend to underestimate the extent to which our taste can be meaningful, rooted in something true about us, rather than reactive and trend-driven. Lately, when I find myself wanting something new, I’ve been considering whether the lack I’m feeling is more fundamental than material—a need for a more coherent story around why I like what I like, and how the things I already have can better tell it.
For me, there’s a lot of possibility in that inversion. Counter to the advertising narrative that my true self is waiting to be found on the sixth page of an e-commerce site, there’s a thrill in imagining I already have everything I need—that more, actually, might invite a certain risk. Style needs patina and purpose, a sense of depth and time spent with our things. It’s valuable for the very same reason it isn’t for sale.
My favorite thing I read last week was “For Better and Worse,” by Lynn Darling for Esquire, an amazing opus on marriage full of perfect lines. Last week’s 15 things included some other things I’ve been watching, eating, and listening to. The rec of the week was the best cotton underwear. Now I’m spoiled for options!
Lastly, in case you missed it, last week’s podcast featured me and my friend Michelle spiraling about Taylor Swift. Some amazing comments under this one. I have the best listeners.
I hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley