If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat¶
There are songs that make me cry that you'll never hear about. There are poems I read while my mother lay dying in front of me, and unless I tell you, you'll never know which ones. My taste in music, in food, in art, all of it is private by default. You'd have to eat with me to know I'd happily live on fried chicken. Nobody reads my diary unless I show them. Nobody comes into my home unless I invite them in.
But the moment I step outside, they're looking at you. Before I speak, before you know what I do, before you know anything about how I think, you've already seen my taste. Personal style is the most front-loaded expression of taste there is. Every other form you get to keep to yourself. This one you have to subject everyone to. Some days I feel terrible and I put on a fucking blazer. Some days I want to wrap myself up and hide in the shadows, and some days I want to command the room. The clothes go out ahead of me.
So style is where I want to start, because it's the honest lab. But this essay is really about taste, and why I think it's become the thing most people are missing.
Bottlenecks¶
As AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself.
What does that mean? Taste is a little bit of aesthetic judgment, knowing what's beautiful. But I think taste is really your ability to model out what people will like. It's curation versus consumption. And with AI there's so much more volume of work now that it's really easy to regress to the mean. In which case it's not really taste. Taste is a kind of risk-taking. You're choosing to deviate from the safe average.
Art School¶
I felt the old version of this in art school. My taste exceeded my ability. I could see what good work looked like, I just couldn't make it yet, and I didn't have the words to describe what was going on.
Now AI flips that. Ability is basically free, so for most people, ability exceeds taste. You can make anything, and you don't know what's worth making.
Eating¶
If you want to be a good chef, you have to eat at people's restaurants. You can't just look at the menu.
Same with clothes. So many people I know refuse to try things on because they're not going to buy them. This is exactly the wrong way to approach it. Go into the store. Try on a bunch of shoes. Try on the weird jacket. Move around in it. Some days you learn something and buy nothing, and that's a fine day.
Vocabulary¶
In art school I didn't have the words. This is how you get them.
As you eat, start asking why you like what you like. Do I like the way this touches my skin, or the way it drapes over my skin? Those are different things. I rarely think about items of clothing in isolation. I'm thinking about materials and draping first, structure and form first. Then lines. Color, for me, is simple: gray, blue, black, red. That's it. Your hierarchy will be different. You only find it by putting things on your body and paying attention.
That's the whole method, honestly. Eat widely, notice what you notice, and keep a record of why.
Transcribing¶
Walter Benjamin talked about mechanical reproduction stripping the aura from art. I think AI does something worse. It gives you the destination without the hours of noticing that used to get you there.
In music, transcribing a solo forces you to listen deeply. You sit there rewinding the same four bars over and over. AI can just give you the chart. But it gives you the chart, not the ear. So AI doesn't just strip the aura from art, it strips the aura from learning. The felt distance that made a skill feel earned.
This has been true for how I learned pottery. I can't mechanistically learn pottery. I just have to feel and listen to my intuition.
Wandering¶
There are video games that don't allow minimaps, because the designers felt that with waypoints, players would just walk from one area to another and not really notice where anything is.
We do the same thing to ourselves. We don't wander down streets anymore. We take Ubers that take us there directly. We used to learn places by wandering. Now we follow the blue line.
If taste grows with attention, and the tools keep removing the attention, then you have to put it back on purpose.
Authorship¶
The same collapse happened to the things we consume.
Think about what TikTok did. On YouTube, on early Instagram and Twitter, you followed a person. The person made things, and you saw the things because you'd chosen the person. TikTok inverted it. You don't follow anyone. The content just floods in, and the creator is secondary to the content. It's like never reading books, only screenshots of pages. Songs are a minute long now because the algorithm optimized them down, and people listen to forty-second soundbites without ever learning the name of the song, let alone who's playing on it.
It's not just content. Nobody's eating food from their mom anymore. Nobody's thinking about who's cooking the food. And look at how people talk about clothing trends. It's cowboy boots, it's jorts, it's the Chanel glasses. A kind of object. Nobody's asking about the creative director, the house, who actually made this thing and why.
Here's what making things yourself teaches you: everything, someone had to make. How deep a pocket goes, how wide the pant leg is, even the curvature of a seam. Someone had to think about that. When you have low consciousness about this, you go, "these are pants, I'm going to put on these pants." The app is the way it is because it is the way it is. But nothing is the way it is by accident. Every object is a pile of decisions somebody made, and taste is mostly learning to see the decisions.
Eating Slowly¶
So the practice I'd recommend goes past consuming the object. Go find the human.
With music, this is the clearest version. I don't just listen to the single the algorithm hands me. I listen to the whole album, on record. And then I go read. Who's the drummer? Who's the bassist? If I love the drums on this record, what else has this drummer played on? Who produced it? When was it made? Oh, this was made right after his father died. Now I'm not just consuming a sound. I'm in a relationship with the circumstances that produced it.
I do the same thing with clothes. I buy from very few brands, and I think about the designer first, then explore within those constraints. Yohji Yamamoto when I want all black and drapey. Kapital when I want a little more fun. Extreme Cashmere when I want to be elevated and relaxed. Rick Owens when I want to be more aggressive and intense. Most of my shoes are just leather shoes. That's basically the whole roster. It's a narrow bet, and I'm fine with that, because taste was never about covering the whole map.
And I've developed relationships. When I go to New York I'll text someone at the Yohji store, someone at the Extreme Cashmere store, tell them I'm coming. I'll try things on for forty minutes, an hour, chit-chat. Some days I buy nothing. Some days a couple of pieces. But that friction, the texting ahead, the conversation, the hour of just being in the clothes, is what makes it rewarding. We've spent twenty years optimizing friction out of consumption, and the friction was where the taste was. Knowing who made a thing is just eating slowly.
Voting¶
Yes, the things I buy are expensive. That's not a knock on thrifting, it's probably a critique of myself. But I don't think I'm buying material value. When I spend money, I'm voting. For a designer, for a way of making things, for a set of decisions I want more of in the world. That money came from my time, my attention, my work. The trade feels fair to me, because I think I'm expensive too.
Posters¶
And once you've paid attention like this for long enough, you start composing in the other direction. I think of dressing like a poster. From across the street, an impression. Come closer and you see the fabrication, the detail in a seam. Talk to me and you get something else, and eventually I'm telling you some random fact about my free diving. Clothing built in layers, for people who come closer.
You spend years learning to notice what others made, and then you make something worth noticing.
Rikyū¶
There's a story in the Book of Tea about Kobori Enshū, the tea master who came after Rikyū. A student told him, your taste must be even better than Rikyū's, because everything you collect, everyone agrees is beautiful. Rikyū's collection, only Rikyū could appreciate. And Enshū said no, that's exactly why I'm the lesser man. I was just picking what most people would like. Rikyū had the courage to love things only he could see.
That's the whole thing, in one story. Taste isn't consensus. It's not judgment first, either. It's easy to be a critic. Curiosity has to come first, because without curiosity you never broaden your horizons. What's left after the curiosity is courage: being honest enough to love what actually resonates with you, even when nobody else is wearing it or listening to it or buying it.
AI shifted the bottleneck from making to noticing. Ability is free. Attention is not. If the tools remove the attention, apprenticeship has to be reinvented around attention, and you have to put it back yourself. Eat at the restaurants. Try on the clothes. Transcribe the solo. Learn the drummer's name. Wander without the blue line.
If you want taste, you're gonna have to eat.