On Taste
Why Taste Still Matters: Aesthetic Trends, Identity, and the Politics of Preference in 2025
Taste used to be private. Or at least, it pretended to be. It signaled through quiet codes: the books you left out on the coffee table, the records stacked beside your player, the particular shade of beige you painted your walls. But now, taste is performative by design. It’s algorithmically broadcast, hashtagged, and monetised. We’ve entered an era of what you could call hyper-aesthetic consciousness — where every decision, from your skincare routine to your bookshelf organisation, is part of a visible brand. This isn’t necessarily new — class has always expressed itself through aesthetics — but the pace and precision with which taste is now policed, recycled, and redistributed feels distinctly modern. A few years ago, “minimalism” meant Muji and clean lines, and now it means #quietluxury…
This acceleration breeds instability. Trends age in dog years. What was aspirational last year is embarrassing now; what was embarrassing becomes chic if you say it with enough irony. We go through micro-aesthetic eras like shedding skins. In the past twelve months alone we’ve lived through strawberry girls, office sirens, tomato girls, coquettes, rockstars, clean girls, and tradwives — each one promising some moodboard version of authenticity, each one a little performance of virtue or edge. The point isn't whether these are “real” identities. The point is that they shape how we interpret others and ourselves — through tone, palette, texture. Where once taste might have hinted at inner life, it now is the inner life, curated for visibility.
Of course, none of this is entirely new. The 20th-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is never just about preference; it’s a social weapon, a way of signalling class, education, and distinction. You don’t just like opera or Brutalist architecture or raw milk cheese — you wield them, often unconsciously, to position yourself in a hierarchy. What’s changed is how democratised this signalling has become. You don’t need a country house or a postgraduate degree in comparative literature to perform cultural capital anymore — you just need a Pinterest board, a Depop account, or a well-lit bookshelf colour-coded in Farrow & Ball tones. What Bourdieu saw as implicit has become explicit, and faster: we now build ourselves in public with taste as scaffolding. Everyone’s performing, and everyone’s watching. Even “bad taste” — camp, kitsch, McBling — only becomes legible as taste once it’s been aestheticised and recontextualised, once it’s had its moment on a moodboard or a Marc Jacobs tote.
We’ve become fluent in aesthetic dialects — not just in fashion or interior design, but in language, humour, even ethics. What counts as “good taste” in politics, in dating, in discourse, shifts constantly, and woe betide the person who falls out of sync. In a world where self-presentation is inseparable from public identity, taste has become not just a style — but a moral grammar.
Philosophers have always circled taste with a mix of suspicion and fascination. Hume, writing in the 18th century, tried to square the problem: how can judgments of taste feel so right when they’re obviously subjective? His answer was that true taste lies with the cultivated critic — someone with delicacy, experience, and a trained sensibility. Taste, in this view, isn't universal, but it's not arbitrary either. Kant pushed it further. For him, aesthetic judgment isn’t about liking something — it’s about the feeling that others should like it too. He called it a “universal subjective validity,” which is a way of saying “this is just my opinion, but it’s also correct”. There’s something strangely prophetic in that. Scroll through TikTok or Twitter, and you’ll find thousands of people making exactly that kind of claim — this scent, this song, this film, this girl’s outfit at Cannes — all cast as if they’re obvious truths about beauty or taste, rather than deeply coded, contingent preferences.
However, what both Hume and Kant missed is how tied taste is not just to pleasure or judgment but to identity. What we find beautiful, moving, stylish, or cringe says something about how we want to be seen. Aesthetic movements today aren’t just about what looks good — they’re about staking claims: political, moral, even metaphysical. A vibe shift isn’t just a change in colour palette, it’s a subtle repositioning of values. When “clean girl” replaces “e-girl,” when soft-launching your relationship becomes passé and a hard launch is suddenly sincere, when cottagecore gives way to blokette — what’s really happening is a renegotiation of what it means to be tasteful, relatable, aspirational. We’re fluent in these shifts now, even when we claim not to care. Choosing to disengage becomes its own kind of taste: a studied refusal, a cultivated disinterest. Even the something like the irony-drenched nostalgia of Y2K becomes a performance of anti-performance, a wink at the camera while still hitting publish. Taste, in this landscape, starts to feel less like a reflection of who we are and more like a currency we spend — or a costume we wear — depending on the season. But that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. Quite the opposite: the fact that we fight over it, obsess over it, try to detach from it and fail — all that suggests how much weight taste still carries. It’s just that now, instead of reflecting fixed identities or stable hierarchies, it becomes a way of surfing culture’s shifting tides while trying to say something.
You can see this playing out in real time with the current obsession over “core” aesthetics and micro-trends — not just in fashion, but in lifestyle, politics, even grief. The aestheticisation of everything, from “coquette girl” to “mob wife winter” to “dissociative feminism,” reflects a deeper anxiety about how to live when every choice is visible and interpretable. Even movements that claim to resist commodification — like the recent revival of analog nostalgia, or the romanticising of slowness and silence in contrast to algorithmic life — get caught up in the same circuits of aesthetic performance. When you film your digital detox or curate your “unplugged” retreat into a perfect Instagram carousel, the rebellion becomes another genre of branding. As writer Rayne Fisher-Quann recently put it, “you can’t opt out, only costume-change.” It’s not that people don’t have convictions, but that convictions now have moodboards — belief refracted through the prism of aesthetics. And in that sense, taste has become not just a signal of who we are, but a means of navigating the moral fog of late modernity — a compass we polish even as we question if it still points north.
So maybe taste isn’t frivolous after all. Maybe it’s one of the last places where we try to reconcile instinct and judgment, aesthetics and ethics, self-presentation and sincerity. We reach for beauty — or ugliness, or irony — not just to be seen, but to test the limits of what we believe, and how we want to belong. It’s why people cry over Wes Anderson films, or defend their love of reality TV with quasi-Marxist fervour, or get existential about their Spotify Wrapped. Taste gives shape to what feels otherwise shapeless — it’s a map, drawn in eyeliner and playlists and Substack essays, tracing the outlines of something we haven’t quite figured out how to say. And in a world where so much feels ungraspable, there’s something grounding in the idea that what we like — what we really like — might still be a clue. Not just to who we are, but to what kind of world we’re trying to build. Or at least, what kind of world we’re trying to survive.