The End of Taste as Currency
Why knowing the right references stopped being enough, and what differentiates work now
Hi everyone,
I hope you’re all well. I’ve been very busy the past few weeks, many shoots and a few in post, lots of pitches and a few more coming up that I’m excited about. I’ve been pushing myself outside what I usually go for this year, working with different photographers, different styling registers, and different types of subjects, partly to find what I get excited about visually again. The thing I keep noticing is that the stage I love most is still the research and ideating before anything is shot. That’s where the work actually gets made for me. Everything after is the proof.
Which is what made me want to write this post specifically.
Last week I scrolled past the same Margiela for Hermès reference for the third time in seven days. Three different newsletters on Notes, IG stories and a TikTok carousel. Three different angles on the same era. Maybe it’s my algorithm, but even then. All the right reference, all the right framing, all functionally the same post. Around the same week I saw the same image of MK Olsen’s beaten up Kelly bag, an image taken years ago, and again a “revolutionary” shoot by Szilveszter Makó and how it’s changing image-making and AI. None of these references are wrong. They are accurate, they are interesting, and they are also doing something other than what people think they are doing.
What is being called taste right now is mostly recognition. The ability to point at the right things, follow the right people, repeat what has already been validated by someone whose own taste was validated by someone else. People share their wishlists not because they want the items but because the wishlist itself is the signal. Cult restaurants get filmed before they have served their first month of customers. The same handful of brands appear in everyone's round-ups. The references that were supposed to mark someone out as a thinker have become a checklist of belonging.
Taste, in 2026, has become almost entirely performative.
The currency that stopped being scarce
For most of the industry’s recent history, taste was a slow accumulation. You spent years inside an agency, a magazine, a studio. You travelled to see a single exhibition. You overheard something in a bar that pointed you to a designer you had not encountered. Knowing about Margiela’s Hermès years, recognising a particular Alexander McQueen season, being aware of which photographer’s monographs actually mattered, these signalled that you had been in the conversation long enough to have absorbed it.
That world has dissolved. The cultural critic W. David Marx, in Status and Culture, makes the case that the internet has not killed taste hierarchies, it has flattened the conditions that used to produce distinct ones. The subcultures that gave taste its texture, the small scenes where references travelled slowly and meant something specific to the people inside them, have been collapsed into a single global pool where everything surfaces at once. The Margiela Hermès era is now indexed on Substack, on Pinterest, in Sourcewhere drops, in dedicated archive accounts, in retrospectives across every major fashion publication.
The references that used to take years to absorb can now be acquired in an afternoon of scrolling. But the industry is still pricing taste as if it were scarce.
Most working creatives now have access to the same references, the same recommendations, the same archives. What is genuinely scarce has shifted somewhere else.
The pressure to demonstrate good taste has produced an arms race. Knowing about Helmut Lang is no longer enough, so you must know about a specific season, or even a specific item. Knowing about a season is no longer enough, so you must know about a specific look, a specific cut, the discreet H formed by the six-hole buttons. The signalling has become so refined that the actual point of the reference, what it does, what it argues for, what it makes possible in your own work, gets lost underneath the performance of having recognised it.
There is an observation that has stayed with me. People no longer want the thing. They want the signalling mechanism around the thing. This applies to a Raf Simons archive piece, to natural-wine bars, to particular books, to particular cafe orders. The reference has become the thing, and the work that was supposed to come from engaging with the reference has become almost beside the point.
The reference is identical. The position is different.
The mechanic operates everywhere taste is being signalled right now. Butter yellow on a brand moodboard. Buying Paloma Wool. Troye Sivan’s house on Architectural Digest. The Loewe puzzle bag in a flatlay. A Wales Bonner campaign image saved on Notes. Each is identical material for the people using it. What differs is the position underneath.
A brand using butter yellow because it has a defendable view on what soft warmth says to a customer in 2026 is doing different work than the brand using it because the colour is winning. A stylist who has tracked Paloma Wool’s specific kind of restraint over five years is doing different work than the buyer who picked it up because it appeared in the right Notes feed last week. The art director who can read a Wales Bonner campaign through Grace Wales Bonner’s writing, her exhibitions, her music programming, is doing different work than the one sharing the same image with no reading underneath. Same reference. Different position. Different work.
It is most visible in fashion because the houses name their lineages openly. Take the Phoebe Philo Céline era. Almost every quiet luxury brand of the last decade pulls from it. The Row pulls from it. Toteme pulls from it. Khaite pulls from it. Peter Do and Daniel Lee, both her former protégés, pull from it in their own work. Philo's own current label, predictably, pulls from it.
The work these brands produce does not look the same. The Row uses the Philo lineage to argue for an inherited generational quietness, an old-money aesthetic that wants to disappear into itself. Toteme uses the same lineage to argue for accessible uniform dressing, a quieter professional confidence at a more attainable price point. Khaite bends it harder, more east-coast, more ambitious, more openly in pursuit of the woman who wants to be looked at while wearing it. Peter Do reads the Philo grammar through a sharper architectural lens. Philo herself uses it to argue for continuity, a refusal to participate in fashion's amnesia about its own recent past.
The reference is identical. The position is completely different. The position is what makes each of these brands, writers, films, or designers recognisable, defendable, and commercially viable on its own terms.
None of them would survive on the reference alone. What separates them is the argument each is making about who they are for, what their audience needs, what they believe about how the work should function in someone’s life.
This is the thing that does not yet circulate as a downloadable skill. You cannot scrape a position off a Pinterest board.You cannot inherit it from following the right people. It comes from the slower process of working out what you actually believe and being willing to hold that belief in public even when it is not currently fashionable.
What this looks like in practice
A position is something you can defend without naming a single trending reference. It is what you would still argue for if everyone you follow stopped recommending it. It is what you find yourself returning to in private that does not fit the consensus. It is the thing in your work that holds when the references around it are stripped away.
Some questions that have been useful for me. What are you actually arguing for in the work, even if you cannot yet articulate it cleanly. What references would you still defend if no one around you was currently recommending them. What do you find yourself returning to that you are slightly embarrassed to share publicly because it does not fit the room. What has been in your work since the beginning that you used to think was a weakness and have started to suspect is the thing.
These are slower questions. They are not solved by reading more or following better. They are solved by sitting with your own responses across years, not weeks.
A note before I keep going. The second round of my Strategic Art Direction programme runs this summer and doors open May 21st. It’s only available 3 times a year with limited spots.
And I’m offering three full scholarships this round. If you want to be considered for one, scroll back in the chat on the Substack app where I’ve posted the application thread, or join the waitlist to be the first to know when applications open more widely.
Three things worth trying this week
Pick one brand, writer, or film whose references you can list, and write down what their actual position is. Make it deeper than their mood, palette. It’s the argument they are making about who they are for and what the work should do in someone’s life. If you cannot articulate it cleanly, that gap is informative.
Name one reference you would still defend if no one in your circle currently shared it. Notice whether you can. Taste is formed from the moment you’re born, maybe you can imagine a scent, a sound or the colours remind you of your childhood room. The reason can be purely emotional.
Open your saved folder and find one image you cannot justify keeping. Sit with the discomfort of not being able to explain it. The unjustifiable images are often the ones doing real work.
So what replaces taste as the highest currency?
Nothing. The premise is the problem.
Look back at the three references I opened this with. The Margiela Hermès era cycling for the third time in a week. The Mary-Kate Olsen Kelly recirculating for the hundredth time. The Szilveszter Makó shoot framed as a turning point for image-making and AI. None of the people sharing those references are wrong. They are using accurate, interesting, current material. What is missing is the position underneath. The Margiela post doesnt argue for what the Hermès years actually meant, but more specifically what it does to you. The MK Olsen post doesn’t commit to a reading of what worn luxury says about wealth in 2026, or why it feels so aspirational to you. The Szilvezstor Makó post does not stake out a defendable claim about what his work means for the next decade of image-making, or why you feel something for it. The references are passwords, and not actual arguments.
That gap is the whole point. Everyone has taste. Everyone always has had taste. Taste is personal. The question that matters is not whether yours is sophisticated enough or current enough or rare enough. It is whether you know what it is and whether you are decisive about it. Knowing what you like and why you like it. Closing the gap between what you respond to and what you actually make. That is the work.
The how does not have to be you. It can be the right collaborators, the right photographer, the right writer, the right team, even ai. But the what has to come from you, and you have to be decisive about it. You need to know what you want, and that comes from understand what you specifically like, so you can create unique ideas and work. It doesn’t matter if AI is as competent as other people with skills, because the motivation for creation is coming from you. From what you WANT to make.
The people who treat taste as a holy grail, who curate it across decks and Notes and Pinterest boards and round-ups, are usually the most indecisive. Ask them in two years what they actually believe in and the answer will be a version of whatever is currently in the room. Performance is the alibi for not committing to anything.
The reality, less flattering for everyone but more useful, is that everyone has taste and not everyone’s taste is for everyone. Different taste attracts different people. The job is not to have the right taste. The job is to know yours, be decisive about it, and trust that the work made from a decisive position will reach the people whose taste it is for. The rest is performance.
Taste is what you recognise. Position is what you defend. Decisiveness is what makes either useful.
I would love to hear from you on this one. What is a position you hold that does not currently fit the consensus. A reference you would defend in a room where nobody else shared it. Something you keep returning to that you are slightly embarrassed to admit.
Drop it in the comments. The most interesting answers usually live there rather than in the essay.
Love,
Zoë
I loved this read so much.
I’ve spent the last year trying to develop my own taste while also learning how to play the social media game enough to get my work seen. And I’ve caught myself falling into the trap of just performing taste… reposting references, mimicking aesthetics, flattening ideas into whatever format is currently “working.”
What’s a little frustrating though is that doing that *does* work - but it’s soulless. Trends are powerful, social media is meant to be consumed quickly, and people instantly recognize the signal in content.
But I also feel myself becoming desensitized to this type of content… and I wonder if others are also getting bored of it. I.e. personal brands whose brands focus on “creative direction” actually feels more like trend narration than perspective (Tiktok, Instagram).
There’s no real lens behind it, just a bunch of aesthetic clips and photos to capture your attention. The formula has been distilled and used by the masses, and everything is starting to blend together… I find myself stopping to actually watch a video less and less because everything just feels the same. and I just wonder, where can/will social media go for here? if short form content works the best, and it’s challenging to work authenticity and depth into something that must be quickly + easily consumable.
What I find most useful here is the distinction between reference and position. A lot of people can now identify the “right” image, the “right” brand, the “right” archive moment, but recognition is not the same as authorship. It’s easy to build a moodboard that signals taste. It’s much harder to defend why that reference matters to you, what you’re trying to say through it, and what kind of world it helps you build.
The part about references becoming passwords really lands. So much of visual culture right now feels like people proving they belong in the room instead of actually making an argument from inside it.
For me, the question becomes less “do I have good taste?” and more “do I have/hold a position strong enough to survive once the references are stripped away?” That feels like the real work.