Why good taste is exhausting
Fatigue may be side-effect of once-in-a-generation pandemic we now live in
I do it every time: Moments before the green light on my computer flashes to signal the start of a Zoom call, I look behind me at my living room to see if anything needs tweaking. Colourful book spines facing forward, the pillows of my ubiquitous couch fluffed, monstera leaves gleaming in their stone planter.
These micro-adjustments to my universe, shrunk by the pandemic to the square feet of my home, are more than simple tidying. They are a presentation and assertion of my taste, which hopefully is good.
Good taste, after all, is a worthwhile thing. Having it wins you compliments, a kind of trust in your inherent respectability and, in the best case, maybe even a small lifestyle empire — all for the price of being able to choose a certain kind of knitwear or red wine. Why buy any couch when you can buy the couch and signal your status as a mid-century-modern esthete? Why not eat toast off an artisanal speckled plate?
We reward others in this quest, too. “I only want to surround myself with pieces that bring me joy,” says your friend. You groan out a deep mm-hmm in endorsement. We don’t just like, we curate — like gallerists selecting the best works to adorn the walls of our lives. Brands, in turn, have never been more ready to sell us the things that reflect our aspirational authority back at us.
Lately, though, this constant buying in — into tangible aspiration and artful consumption — is starting to lose its sheen. So, too, is the incessant sizing up of my tastes and choices against some nebulous collective esthetic. It took utter global upheaval to make me question the power and meaning I’ve been assigning to what is effectively just a bunch of stuff.
“We should remember that taste gets its power both from conformity — doing what other tasteful people are doing — and distinction: carving out some novel version of good taste that doesn’t simply ape what others are doing,” says Tom Vanderbilt, who literally wrote the book on taste with his investigation of our habits and choices, “You May Also Like.”
The notion of good taste has spread to all aspects of our lives: music, books, food, films, decor and, of course, clothing. Added together, these become the building blocks of our outwardfacing persona. So it has never been easier to buy into some widely accepted notion of good taste, explains Vanderbilt.
“It’s why every bathroom has subway tile and every house has shiplap. Even former humble things, like water, ketchup or kitchen matches, have become objects of connoisseurship. The more choices there are, the more we might think that our choice becomes personally important for, otherwise, why would there be so many choices?”
Taste goes deeper than merely beautifying our existence. Cultivating it is a timeless process of socialization; it’s how we gain entry into like-minded groups. It’s also how we “figure out how to participate in a world that we didn’t really choose,” says Amit Bhattacharjee, a marketing professor at international business school INSEAD.
My own taste signals — the vintage clothes I wear, the craft IPA I drink — are likely different from yours, but the motivations are universal. “From where we sit in the wealthy, developed world, we have our basic needs met, so more and more of our consumption is about expressing our values and communicating to others,” says Bhattacharjee. “If there was no information in these things, we wouldn’t use them.”
My good-taste fatigue, then, might just be a side effect of a once-in-a-generation pandemic.
“Your world suddenly becomes very small and everything is a reflection of your past choices,” explains Bhattacharjee. “Maybe you bought a couch because it looks awesome or shows that you know about obscure design movements from the last century, but it’s actually not that comfortable. Maybe this makes us more aware of those trade-offs.”
The sudden disappearance of groups — at work, at school or out in the world — makes for a humbling realization that much of our consumption is done for the sake of others. What does good taste matter if no one is around to see it — or even better — approve of it?
When I bring up the idea of taste fatigue to Vanderbilt, he likens taste to a performance, “one that requires constant rehearsing and can become rather exhausting.”
With everyone relegated to their homes, this performance has found a new venue: our screens. “It’s turned a largely private interior sphere outwards, into the eyes of our friends and coworkers. We’ve lost the ‘safe space’ of our inward self, where we don’t have to look our best or create some idealized setting for the camera,” says Vanderbilt.
Indeed, every day now feels like those heady few minutes before you expect fancy guests, the visible parts of your home fluffed and polished to an impossible standard.
While we lost our routines, and the traditional pathways for our taste to reach an audience, that doesn’t mean that taste-signalling went away.
“We will always find a way to convey positive information about ourselves,” explains Bhattacharjee. “These underlying drives don’t go away just because the set of ways we have to express them are constrained. We will just find other outlets.” These new outlets might be joining a virtual yoga class, setting a reading goal or baking sourdough — the definitive good-taste bread. These activities, done en masse, become new and trendy taste signifiers.
As a fashion editor, I’m quite familiar with how trends can feel intriguing while they’re on the rise, vital at their apotheosis and then suddenly banal. But this novelty-driven cycle of hype-and-burn exists everywhere and it’s speeding up thanks to our super-connected world. “How quickly that ‘sell by’ date can expire when it comes to taste is directly linked to how quickly and how widely it is adopted,” says Vanderbilt.
When Vanderbilt sat in on Pantone’s annual colour forecasting meeting (from which the buzzy Colour of the Year emerges), he saw our noveltyseeking instincts first-hand. “A lot of the comments from forecasters were along the lines of, ‘White is starting to look fresh to me again.’ I think this ties into a psycho-sensory condition in which we naturally tire after too much exposure to any one stimulus.”
Faced, over these months, with only the taste objects I’ve chosen for myself amid the stagnation of isolation, it’s no wonder I want to take it all down and start the cycle anew.
Ultimately, the notion of good taste straddles two worlds: the surface, consumption-driven realm and the deeper human desire for belonging and reinvention. It’s neither entirely superficial nor wholly noble. And much as I might yearn for what Vanderbilt calls “naive good taste,” something that can exist privately, seeking neither approval nor adoption by others, that won’t happen. We’ve come too far and too closely linked what we own with who we wish to be.
A terrazzo planter or vintage record player may tell the world something about us, but it won’t tell the full, nuanced story. It’s just stuff, right?