A question of taste

Untangling from the algorithm

I’ve been thinking about taste a lot these last few weeks. Taste, as in “a person's tendency to like or be interested in something.” It started with an interview between Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka titled How to Discover Your Own Taste. 

Kyle is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, and the two of them talk about how as our digital lives have become increasingly driven by algorithms, it may be easier to find the playlists or TV shows that fit with our immediately obvious preferences, but it’s a lot harder to stumble upon the surprising treasures that help us to develop our own unique sense of taste. The kinds of culture that enrich our lives in ways that high-speed trends and recycled recommendations just can’t.

I connected to it because they talked a lot about music, and I’ve been in quite the musical rut lately. Each week, Spotify serves me the exact same songs, over and over and over again. No discovery in my Discover Weekly, no room for anything genuinely new to me, no assistance expanding my taste beyond The Mamas and the Papas, Carole King, and Jerry flippin’ Rafferty!

The conversation reminded me of ideas from people in fashion and interiors too, which made me want to look a bit closer at what really makes up our taste when we paddle away from the waves of “if you liked this, you’ll like that”, and think for a moment about what we deeply and uniquely like.

Taste is personal

When I look around my living room — where I am sitting right now — my mind is flooded with memories and faces. There’s an old Martini carafe I got from a flea market in France, the film camera that Andy and I take on all our holidays, and a postcard from the Alice Neel exhibition where I first hung out with my friend Cat. There are books from my dad, glasses from my grandma, mugs from my mum’s favourite Danish potter, and a woven antique pouch that I got in Bolivia last year. So many of my belongings, and I’m sure many of yours too, are not just things but little portals into my past. They are my taste because they connect me to people and places and times and memories.

Paige Wassel, a great interiors YouTuber whose videos I watch every Monday, talks a lot about this kind of connection to our things and our homes. She’s always encouraging second thoughts about the checkerboard rug which might be very trendy on Instagram right now, but which may very well be dated before it gets dropped at your door. Instead, she urges people to opt for timeless, unique pieces with lots of character and personal history. Things that, even with time, will stay precious to you because of when, where, or who you got them from.

Taste is also dependent on place — where you are from, where you have lived or visited, and the textile, food, music, architecture, and film cultures specific to those places that may have rubbed off on you. My mum is a great example of this. She grew up in northern New South Wales and she loves a bit of country kit. But she’s also lived in Japan, Vietnam, Belgium, England, and France — all of which you can see from walking through her home, eating from her Igezara plates that only narrowly escaped the Kobe earthquake, drinking tea from her grandmother's tea cups, or walking across her kilim rugs. Mum’s a good example because she’s lived all over the shop, but the same applies when you’ve been in the same small town since birth. Your taste is like a unique fingerprint or a map of memories, influences, objects, and ideas that have been woven together throughout your life to form the fabric of you.

What I mean by all this is that…

Taste transcends simple categorization

Ava Williams

recently wrote a piece critiquing the constant cycle of over-categorization that seems to happen so endlessly in fashion these days — think Coastal Grandmothers, Eclectic Grandpas, Tomato Girls. She talks about how off the back of these buzz-word trends, people attempt to put themselves in very specific algorithmic boxes that lack any consideration for personal history or complexity. She says, “We get so specific that the idea itself has no barriers to break, no play. Forcing ourselves to hyper-analyze and name singular facets of personal style creates a rigid identity instead of an evolving one.”

I came across a similar thought on rigidity, repetition, and categorization in style in a newsletter by

Harling Ross Anton

that I read last year. She explains that the social media algorithm is designed to identify patterns and consistencies that allow it to categorize users and serve them content. “It’s no surprise then,” she writes, “that in an age where social media dictates so much of our thinking around how we get dressed, either knowingly or unknowingly — style would be swept up by the gravitational pull toward categorization as well.” We are all multi-faceted people with meandering pasts, diverse interests, and an eye for things that don’t always make sense. To categorize ourselves as the algorithm attempts to would be to negate the delicious complexities that make us who we are.

For a while there, working from home and all, I was wearing leggings and a jumper most days. It made walking the dog at lunchtime easy and mess-free, but I remembered recently that I like getting dressed! It makes me feel put together and like myself! So over the past month or so, I’ve been thinking more actively about what I put on in the mornings, and while I once might have gone to Pinterest or Instagram for ideas, I’ve been seeking out less algorithmic inspiration.

Movies and magazines are always a good place to start, but I’ve found some great guidance in newsletter form as well, from

Leandra Medine Cohen

’s The Cereal Aisle and

Becky Malinsky

’s 5 Things You Should Buy, in particular. Most importantly, I’ve been shopping my own closet instead of shopping shopping and it’s made me realise that I really like the clothes I already have. There are plenty of surprises and fun to be had by rummaging through and trying something on in a different way, rather than caving into the pair of trousers I don’t need that keep following me around the internet.

Knowing and learning your taste is like knowing and learning yourself and the cultural, visual, and even philosophical threads that make up your world. It’s an attention to the way you live and the things you surround yourself with so that you’re not just filling up your life and spaces with things that have no root or connection to who you are. It’s a bit more labour-intensive, but I think it’s worth it for the rich, surprising, eclectic beauty of a life lived in alignment with what you really, truly like.

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A few other bits

• If you missed last week’s interview with Maria, I strongly recommend you go back and have a read. It was such a great chat about so many things — speculative futures, the power of storytelling, and for paid subscribers, the challenges and gifts that come from living with chronic fatigue + a great reading list.

• If you too are struggling with Spotify fatigue, I would highly recommend the NTS Breakfast Show from 9-11 on weekdays. Great tunes and great chats!

• And finally,

  Seb Emina
  , former editor of The Happy Reader (the final issue of which I have been happily reading over the past few days), has started a newsletter called
  Read Me
  which is fast becoming a favourite of mine. Funny, thoughtful, juicy, a good length.

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See you in the next one,

Annabel