We have spent about fifteen years politely pretending that taste is a matter of opinion. That everyone’s taste is equal. That to say one thing looks better than another is to commit some sort of small, unforgivable act of social violence. I would like, today, with love in my heart, to end this agreement.
Taste is not a democracy. Taste is a practice. Like all practices, some people are further along in it than others. This is fine. This is, in fact, more than fine. It is how every other human skill works, and we should stop acting as though style were the one exception.
I say this as someone with a long, documented history of being on the wrong side of the taste curve. I own photos I would not voluntarily show you. There is a prom dress involved. There were, in 2009, jeans that were sincerely frightening. There was a sustained eighteen-month period during which I wore boleros. At no point during any of this did I require the universe to pretend my choices were equal to those of a woman who had been wearing Phoebe Philo-era Céline with confidence for twenty years. I required only that the universe let me learn. Which, given enough time and enough mirrors, it did. The mirrors were more honest than my friends. Friends are too kind for this kind of work. Mirrors are ruthless, thank god.
The idea that taste is egalitarian is, I’m sorry to say, a marketing lie. A very clever one. It suits companies that would like you to believe everything in the store is correct for you, personally. If taste were real, if there were actually such a thing as this is better than that, you might start to walk past the rack. You might stop buying the trend. You might slow down the whole conveyor belt that brings new inventory into your life every forty-two days. And that is bad for commerce. So commerce whispers, gently and constantly, that taste does not exist. That beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That there are no wrong answers. That your personal style is, whatever it is, valid.
There are wrong answers. We all know there are wrong answers. We whisper about them to our closest friends and then pretend in public we don’t. We text photos to our best friend before committing. We ask, is this insane? We already know the answer. We are just outsourcing the permission to say it out loud.
The problem with pretending taste doesn’t exist is that it takes the ladder away. If there is no such thing as better, there is also no such thing as getting better. Which is a catastrophe for every person standing in front of her closet trying to dress more like herself and less like whoever sold her the jeans. The woman who wants to level up has been told, by the culture, that there is no such thing as leveling up. That she is already at the top. That her current taste is her best taste. This is, among other things, discouraging. It is also false. She has a ceiling above her head. She is just being told there is no ceiling, so she doesn’t try to raise it.
Taste, to be clear, is not snobbery. It is not class. It is not about owning expensive clothes. Some of the most tasteful women I have ever met made teacher’s salaries their whole working lives. Some of the least tasteful women I have ever met have been personally handed a Birkin by the man in Paris. Taste is not correlated with wealth. It is correlated with attention. With looking hard, for a long time, at beautiful things. With being willing to admit when something is better. With being willing to say, out loud, without cruelty: yes, this; no, that.
Here is what taste actually is. Taste is a body of accumulated preference. It is everything you have ever seen and loved, everything you have ever worn and regretted, everything you’ve looked at long enough to have an opinion about, compiled, over years, into a kind of private library of yes and no. The library is yours. Nobody can hand you one. Nobody can sell you one. You can be influenced, but the final curation is always yours. That is why the library is so valuable. It is the one thing in your aesthetic life that cannot be bought.
And the library, to work, has to admit that some things are better than others. Otherwise there is no library. There is just a pile.
I want to say something specific, because I can already hear the objection. The objection is going to be that better is subjective, that one woman’s better is another woman’s worse, that my better is not your better. Fine. I will grant this in the general case. In any specific case, however, we can all usually agree, quite easily, which garment is better. Put two white shirts next to each other — a beautifully cut Italian poplin and a thin fast-fashion knockoff. Everyone in the room, even the six-year-old, can tell which one is better. Nobody is seriously debating this. We are all quietly agreeing. We just don’t say it out loud anymore, because we have been trained not to.
I would like us to start saying it out loud. Kindly, but firmly. This is the better shirt. This is the better silhouette on you. This is the shoe that will survive a decade, and this is the shoe that will die on the fifth wear. These are not rude things to say. These are the sentences a good friend, or a good stylist, or a good editor, or a good mother, has always said. They are the sentences that help a woman get from her current taste to her next taste. They are kind.
A house with a point of view, and this is what I think a brand like Frivolity has to be — is a house that is willing to say these sentences out loud, on behalf of the reader. Not every reader agrees with every sentence. That is fine. A reader with her own taste uses the house’s taste as a sparring partner. She takes the parts she agrees with, pushes back on the parts she doesn’t, and leaves the conversation sharper. A house without a point of view, by contrast, cannot sharpen anyone. It just reflects whatever the reader brought in.
Which is not a house. It is a lobby.
The hopeful thing, actually, is how much faster taste develops when you are allowed to admit it exists. A woman who decides, this year, that she has taste to build, and that she is willing to judge, can level up in about eighteen months. I have watched this happen many times. She starts looking at photographs. She starts naming the details. She starts saying what she loves and what she doesn’t. She starts wearing her opinions. Six seasons later, she is unrecognizable — not because she bought more clothes, but because she has a library now. She can walk through a store and tell you, in a sentence, which three pieces are the real ones and which thirty are filler. This is a skill. It’s a real skill. It’s learnable. It’s the one that getting-dressed literature gave up on when it agreed to pretend taste doesn’t exist.
The final thing I want to say is that this is not actually about fashion. It’s about refusing the flattening of everything. We live in a culture that has, for about fifteen years, mistaken the abandonment of judgment for kindness. It is not kindness. It is a failure of attention. Telling someone their taste is fine when it isn’t fine is not a gift. Telling someone their taste is great when it’s growing is the real gift. Growth requires a destination. Growth requires the admission that there are better places to get to. Taste is a place you can get to. Not a fixed place, taste keeps moving, taste keeps evolving, but a better place than where you were. You are allowed to try to get there. And the rest of us are allowed to watch you do it, and cheer, and say, god, she got so good, because she did.
So yes. Taste is not a democracy. It is a practice. And like all practices, the people who take it seriously get better at it. We are going to take it seriously. We are going to say better out loud. We are going to defend the library. And we are going to trust each other to grow, because flattening the room was never the nice thing. It was just the easy one. And we are, collectively, done with easy. Let’s get tasteful.