Taste is a Muscle

Everything is the Pepsi challenge. Your taste is being tested.

The past 10 years were a cultural bubble, mainlining the algorithmic steroid of global social media. Suddenly everyone knew everything - or at least had all the resources to know everything- they just needed to want to know. Middle managers on LinkedIn are doing Supreme case studies. Grime MC’s are in fast food commercials. The accounting department can pronounce Givenchy.

Logos were on everything and ESPN was tweeting about sneakers and suddenly everyone had a Virgil story. It was a golden age of discovery whose widespread adoption eventually pissed off all the old heads like me.

As the tides will always do - they began to shift. You had moments like “quiet luxury” and understated moodboard type shit crack through. Brands like Prada and The Row and Auralee exploded in their own relative way BECAUSE you had to know wtf you were talking about and couldn’t just see a big ole logo. But the algorithm ate that up too. They were momentary trends instead of cultural shifts - the Content SEO talking points of the month.

The gatekeeper pushback revolved around the concept of TASTE. It wasn’t just enough to know the brands or artists or musicians or coffee shops or $30 martinis - you now have to fit each of these puzzle pieces perfectly together to get the gatekeeper stamp of approval. The denial of entry became: “You Can’t Teach Taste”. It was meant as a putdown and a filter.

But it’s not true.