Every word of this was brilliant. Really thought-provoking and something I wish people would realise when it comes to the *tastemakers* they are letting into their lives (me included)
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.
I couldn’t agree more. Especially what you said about the frustration in the fact that “it does work but it’s soulless.” Your words made me think what it would be like if we used the internet the way we did in the early days: using it to boldly express what we were already discovering we loved in the real world, as opposed to looking to it to figure out what we were supposed to like online.
THANKS Zoë for writing the piece that will allow us all to stop having this endless discussion around taste :D Taste = positioning (strategy!) and there is no ONE taste that is good or bad.
I was literally just contemplating this! People on set asking me about my references and being shocked that my reply was people watching in Bryant Park and recent reads like excerpts from a Toni Mitchell book. As though POV inspiration isn’t clocked (or revered) the same way that literal references are and citing the who is who if what came before (not arguing that history is unimportant rather that lived experience should be a part of our inspiration as a means of originality)
This piece is so clarifying to something that I have felt but couldn’t quite place the finger on. I have found that with more data comes a reliance on it to defend a position without a strong creative reason to anchor it. As far as I can tell this is happening across brands in every industry, and the brand stories are all becoming flat
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.
I love the whole process from research, also my favorite, to creating with a solid foundation influenced by my personal taste to where I can stand back with confidence after leaving my mark and saying “yeah.”
I love how grannies dress and I will die on this hill.
I think old ladies are the most stylish people on this earth because they buy what they like! I adore looking at their amazing leather bags, it makes me so jealous. And I love wearing clothes that my grandma finds for me in a thrift stores!
I've always been really into reading, especially sci-fi and fantasy, and it's absolutely informed my own taste. I gravitate to the ornate, the romantic, and the avant-garde and even though I don't stick to one aesthetic, my taste consistently comes back to clothing that feels like it's part of a story.
I loved this. Especially your point that using a reference as an expression of a deeper idea or philosophy is very different from using it just because you have seen it. The latter is just a tautology
The internet has made everyone an expert in everything, in the same superficial way that it gives everyone access to taste. But as you say in this article, taste is really just current reference. When someone comes along with a unique vision, it really cuts through. It’s not tasteful but radical, with real thinking underneath. For all the discussion about taste being the differentiator between humans and AI, I think the real difference is ideas.
Dancers used to say „to know where are you going, you need to know where are you coming from” - and i believe it doesn’t mean only about knowing craft and foundation of any kind of artistic form, but also to understand what triggers us to create, call it inspiration, reference but i believe it can be anything even an emotion. In my opinion - giving ourselfs time to notice makes a room for a taste, because we start understand our existance on „molecular” level.
Since we are in identity crisis, it’s very hard to construct ourselfs especially on the internet. Internet made us obsessed with capturing/documenting and publishing, but as you say the time that we are devoting for research shrinked. A simple living and experiencing real life is no longer there, so we are not even have time to process what happened between projects. We need to live some time to find something to talk about. There is a beautiful speech of Lauryn Hill, where she explains why there is no album every year(as far as i remember), saying that she needs to live a life to found stuff to talk about in her writings.
The point is if we let us to focus More on real life there is a chance, that there will be More time to real life research, so it will nourish our art. Pure utopian thinking i know, but i hope that we are, at some point, going to get to the point we slow down👌🏻
brick by brick
Every word of this was brilliant. Really thought-provoking and something I wish people would realise when it comes to the *tastemakers* they are letting into their lives (me included)
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.
I couldn’t agree more. Especially what you said about the frustration in the fact that “it does work but it’s soulless.” Your words made me think what it would be like if we used the internet the way we did in the early days: using it to boldly express what we were already discovering we loved in the real world, as opposed to looking to it to figure out what we were supposed to like online.
🙏
Amazing. Speechless. The references cannot constitute the entire thesis. Way may need to go back to the idea of the five sentence paragraph
THANKS Zoë for writing the piece that will allow us all to stop having this endless discussion around taste :D Taste = positioning (strategy!) and there is no ONE taste that is good or bad.
I was literally just contemplating this! People on set asking me about my references and being shocked that my reply was people watching in Bryant Park and recent reads like excerpts from a Toni Mitchell book. As though POV inspiration isn’t clocked (or revered) the same way that literal references are and citing the who is who if what came before (not arguing that history is unimportant rather that lived experience should be a part of our inspiration as a means of originality)
This piece is so clarifying to something that I have felt but couldn’t quite place the finger on. I have found that with more data comes a reliance on it to defend a position without a strong creative reason to anchor it. As far as I can tell this is happening across brands in every industry, and the brand stories are all becoming flat
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.
I love the whole process from research, also my favorite, to creating with a solid foundation influenced by my personal taste to where I can stand back with confidence after leaving my mark and saying “yeah.”
Great job, gotta think about this for a bit.
Amazing article!
I love how grannies dress and I will die on this hill.
I think old ladies are the most stylish people on this earth because they buy what they like! I adore looking at their amazing leather bags, it makes me so jealous. And I love wearing clothes that my grandma finds for me in a thrift stores!
I am an ultimate defender of grandma style!
I've always been really into reading, especially sci-fi and fantasy, and it's absolutely informed my own taste. I gravitate to the ornate, the romantic, and the avant-garde and even though I don't stick to one aesthetic, my taste consistently comes back to clothing that feels like it's part of a story.
I loved this. Especially your point that using a reference as an expression of a deeper idea or philosophy is very different from using it just because you have seen it. The latter is just a tautology
The internet has made everyone an expert in everything, in the same superficial way that it gives everyone access to taste. But as you say in this article, taste is really just current reference. When someone comes along with a unique vision, it really cuts through. It’s not tasteful but radical, with real thinking underneath. For all the discussion about taste being the differentiator between humans and AI, I think the real difference is ideas.
Great article as always.
Dancers used to say „to know where are you going, you need to know where are you coming from” - and i believe it doesn’t mean only about knowing craft and foundation of any kind of artistic form, but also to understand what triggers us to create, call it inspiration, reference but i believe it can be anything even an emotion. In my opinion - giving ourselfs time to notice makes a room for a taste, because we start understand our existance on „molecular” level.
Since we are in identity crisis, it’s very hard to construct ourselfs especially on the internet. Internet made us obsessed with capturing/documenting and publishing, but as you say the time that we are devoting for research shrinked. A simple living and experiencing real life is no longer there, so we are not even have time to process what happened between projects. We need to live some time to find something to talk about. There is a beautiful speech of Lauryn Hill, where she explains why there is no album every year(as far as i remember), saying that she needs to live a life to found stuff to talk about in her writings.
The point is if we let us to focus More on real life there is a chance, that there will be More time to real life research, so it will nourish our art. Pure utopian thinking i know, but i hope that we are, at some point, going to get to the point we slow down👌🏻