Is Taste A Luxury?

Lately, I’ve been circling around a question that seems deceptively simple: is taste a luxury?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, usually in the most ordinary of moments like walking past a perfectly arranged window display in Chelsea, watching a grandmother in a market in Marrakech pick fruit with an elegance no stylist could stage, or even observing the endless carousel of online creators that claim to distil the essence of “good taste”. The question nags at me because taste (to me) feels so natural, so personal, and yet everywhere I look it also appears policed, purchased, inherited. It is both the most intimate thing we have and the most public declaration we make.

I do believe that taste in itself has always been slippery, and I think often times we speak about it with the reverence of something innate, as if some people are simply born knowing which wines pair with which dishes, which shoes belong with which suits, or which artworks whisper refinement and which scream vulgarity. But I think if we look closely, the language of taste has always somewhat been entangled with access. Exposure to certain worlds, certain references, certain histories. You cannot develop an affection for Rothko if you’ve never stood before his work or stumbled upon his work somewhere online. You cannot distinguish Brutalist concrete from the skeletal grace of Bauhaus unless you’ve had the leisure, the time, and frankly the education to learn. Taste does require an archive, and more often than not, those archives aren’t free.

Pierre Bourdieu discussed this in his seminal work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, where he argued that taste is a weapon in the cultural battlefield of class, rather than a natural flowering of individual sensibility. The middle and upper classes curate their likes and dislikes in ways that assert superiority, that create distance from “the masses.” The opera, ballet, certain wines, even minimalism in architecture — these are social markers or declarations of “belonging” to a world that can afford to choose. In that sense, taste is an inherited luxury. One learns what to admire because one has been given the stage, script, and the audience to perform admiration correctly. 

However, I think this is where it gets interesting as I do believe that taste also thrives in the opposite direction, in places where money is scarce but imagination abundant. Jazz did not emerge from drawing rooms; it grew in basements, bars, street corners, as a collective negotiation of pain and pleasure. Streetwear was not conceived under gilded ceilings; it was stitched together by young people who could not afford couture but knew how to make a tracksuit look like a manifesto. Punk rejected refinement outright, turning safety pins and studded denim into symbols of defiance. Caribbean carnival costumes were stitched from resourcefulness as much as sequins. Taste here is not about access to luxury objects but about the radical rearrangement of what one already has, basically a bricolage transformed into a statement. 

And yet, when these street-born aesthetics cross over into luxury, they are legitimised by the very structures that once ignored or dismissed them. Suddenly, trainers (or sneakers) become objects of fetish in fashion houses; punk is reinterpretated on a Paris runway; jazz fills symphony halls with ticket prices that exclude the communities that birthed it. It leads to a cruelty here: a cycle where the poor invent and the wealthy canonise. Taste is no longer just a reflection of personal instinct, rather an industry of validation. Whose taste gets to matter? Whose aesthetic becomes history, and whose is dismissed mere improvisation?

This tension is why I personally find it difficult to give a neat answer to the question. Is taste a luxury? Yes, because to have your taste recognised as “legitimate” usually requires wealth. Or at least a proximity to it. But no, because taste itself — the eye, the instinct, the moment of choosing — can literally come from anywhere. A grandmother arranging flowers in a chipped vase might possess more elegance than a millionaire choosing his yacht’s upholstery. The difference is that one will be remembered, photographed, and archived in glossy magazines; the other will disappear as soon as the petals fall. Therefore, recognition is the true luxury.

I see the way people speak about “good taste.” It is quite fascinating how the phrase is always moralised. It is rarely about personal delight and almost always about collective approval. Someone with “good taste” is someone who knows the codes, who can navigate art galleries without gawking, who can select wines without stumbling over pronunciation, who can wear fashion that looks effortless because they understand the language of proportion, silhouette, and restraint. “Good taste” is often nothing more than conformity to the aesthetic preferences of the dominant class.

There’s also the matter of what we mean when we say someone has “expensive taste.” I do think the phrase itself is a cultural sleight of hand, because it implies that the value of taste is tied to the value of the objects consumed. I would like to imagine Pierre Bourdieu having a field day with this, since his idea of cultural capital explains exactly how luxury objects act as shorthand for refinement, not because they are inherently better, but because they signal belonging to a class that has been taught to read them as superior. If you gravitate towards caviar over crisps, Cartier over costume jewellery, Birkins over canvas totes — does that show discernment, or does it merely demonstrate that you can afford what others cannot? Is it the instinct that leads you towards quality, rarity, refinement, or is it just that the price tag does the work of taste for you? If I tell you I like a certain wine because it costs £800 a bottle, am I revealing an educated palate or simply outsourcing discernment to a number? ​​Expensive taste sometimes feels like a linguistic shortcut for avoiding the deeper work of judgement. The object becomes its own justification: it is good because it is costly. ​​Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura is also relevant too: the aura of an object, its uniqueness and prestige, often owes more to rarity and context than to any intrinsic quality. A Birkin acquires its aura not merely because of its craftsmanship but because you can’t walk into a shop and simply buy one as it is scarce, withheld, and ritualised. So again, when we say someone has “expensive taste,” are we actually saying they have discernment, or are we admitting that their consumption passes for discernment because of the aura attached to the price tag? 

I don’t think true taste works that way. True taste, to me, is the capacity to distinguish, to arrange, and to choose thoughtfully. Not just to default to whatever commands the highest price tag. To have taste is to know that the silk blouse is beautiful not because it is Chanel, but because of the way it falls on the body, the cut of the sleeve, or the line of the collar. Otherwise, “expensive taste” risks becoming an abdication of taste altogether. It is easy to hide behind the authority of cost, but taste that hides is simply camouflage. Not taste.

And then there’s the way I’ve noticed how quickly people crown certain celebrities and influencers as arbiters of taste. A celebrity appears on the red carpet in archival Galliano or an influencer snaps a photo with a flattering pose wearing a Réalisation Par dress and is instantly declared a “fashion icon,” but in truth, we are applauding the machinery behind them: the stylist who sourced the look, the PR team that secured it, and the brand that chose this particular body as its ambassador. Bourdieu again would remind us that cultural capital isn’t only about what you own but about the social networks that allow you to perform ownership convincingly. The public figure becomes the conduit, the mannequin through which cultural desire circulates. Consequently, spectators hungry for reference points mistake access for sensibility. Particularly, I think of TikTok “It girls,” who rise to prominence for a season by wearing Miu Miu pleated skirts or the latest Alaïa bags. Their aesthetic impact is real but fleeting, like sparks on the cultural timeline. Compare that to someone like Diana Vreeland, who wasn’t just wearing clothes but actively shaping the way entire generations thought about fashion — turning “ugly” into chic, elevating the offbeat into the sublime. Or Daphne Guinness, whose choices reflect a personal archive of references, a cultivated eccentricity that feels authored rather than borrowed. The distinction is that one is a muse, the other is a mannequin. One transforms culture by vision; the other decorates culture by proximity. To confuse the two is to reduce taste to costume, to treat fashion as something that happens to a person rather than something they participate in shaping. 

Just because an article of clothing is expensive does not mean the person wearing it has good taste. It may simply mean they were available, photogenic, and willing to play the role of blank canvas in fashion’s ongoing theatre. This is not to deny that some public figures truly do shape culture with their choices, I think of Rihanna turning maternity fashion into a new canon, or A$AP Rocky bending streetwear into couture territory. But for every one of them, there are dozens more who are simply placeholders in fashion’s endless carousel, faces and bodies used to circulate garments that will soon land on someone else. To treat them as arbiters of taste is to mistake the spotlight for the eye behind the lens. They might wear the moment, but it is not always theirs.

But there is also “bad” taste, and here the conversation becomes (deliciously) complicated. Susan Sontag, in her famous essay on camp, framed it as a sensibility that thrives on exaggeration, on the extravagant, on the love of artifice. Bad taste in this sense is not an absence of taste but a deliberate refusal to obey the laws of subtlety and restraint that bourgeois culture sanctifies. Drag queens in sequins and plastic wigs, cabaret performers drenched in rhinestones, queer nightlife shimmering with neon — all of these spaces revel in the synthetic and the glitter-soaked. They take what is often dismissed as “tacky” and turn it into something liberating. The performance is beyond trying to pass as “good” taste, instead flaunting its excess, making a spectacle of itself, and forcing the audience to reimagine the borders of beauty. In this way, bad taste becomes a politics of visibility: a refusal to hide behind whispered elegance, a declaration that flamboyance and parody can be just as culturally significant as restraint.

I think what makes this fascinating is how often fashion cannibalises this so-called bad taste and sells it back as novelty. Designers (that I absolutely adore) from Mugler to Westwood to Galliano have raided the wardrobe of exaggeration and theatrics to produce silhouettes that are unapologetically too-much: Mugler’s hyper-femme cyborg corsets or Schiaparelli’s surrealist gold lips and eye-shaped jewellery. What once existed as camp resistance becomes couture currency. It is honestly quite ironic how, despite once institutionalised, even bad taste becomes its own kind of luxury. Sequins that were once coded as “cheap” become encrusted with crystals and sold for five figures. A drag aesthetic, born out of thrift-store improvisation, becomes a Paris runway show under blinding lights. It proves that fashion depends on bad taste for its lifeblood, feeding off the energy of what bourgeois culture dismisses, but the act of incorporation neutralises its rebellion. What was once a subversive gesture becomes another kind of commodity, wrapped in the sheen of exclusivity.

Camp, of course, is also a survival strategy. For queer communities in particular, “bad taste” has long offered both camouflage and defiance. To exaggerate, to parody, to shimmer too brightly was often the only way to claim space in a world that tried to erase you. Drag queens didn’t stitch sequins onto gowns because they had ateliers at their disposal — they did it because sequins caught the light in a dark bar, because glitter and artifice offered a language of resilience when respectability was denied. Camp transformed shame into spectacle, the insult of “too much” into a badge of honour. It mocked the seriousness of bourgeois taste while insisting that art could live in parody, in performance, in wigs and rhinestones. That’s why to call it merely “bad taste” could feel like missing the point. 

On the other hand, the commodification of taste is perhaps most clearly seen in fashion. Luxury brands have built empires not only by selling products but by selling the right to claim taste. A Hermès Birkin is a certificate that its owner belongs to the club of the discerning. Yet the paradox deepens when you realise that most people who own a Birkin did not spend years cultivating “taste” for its design, since they purchased, or inherited, the symbol of taste itself. Meanwhile, on a street in Ho Chi Minh City or Mexico City, someone is cutting and stitching fabrics into shapes that would stop editors in their tracks, but without the logo, without the institutional validation, it remains invisible to the canon. The hand can create brilliance, but the brand decides whether it counts.

We see similar patterns in food culture. Michelin stars elevate certain cuisines while overlooking others. For decades, fine dining in the West treated French cuisine as the pinnacle, dismissing food from immigrant communities as “ethnic” rather than refined. Now, when those same cuisines are served in minimalist dining rooms with inflated prices, they suddenly acquire legitimacy. Was the taste always there, or did it only count once institutions allowed it? Again, taste is revealed not as a free-floating sensibility but as something tightly knotted to power.

And yet, I resist the cynicism that says taste is only ever a game of wealth. Because there is a magic in personal taste that exists regardless of recognition. The way you decide which songs soundtrack your heartbreaks, which photographs you keep on your wall, which shade of blue makes you feel safe — that is taste too. It is intimate, “unperformative”, and a kind of self-curation that does not need validation. No one else needs to see it; it is its own luxury, the luxury of shaping one’s inner world.

I think often about the small acts of taste in ordinary life. A grandmother’s mismatched tea set that somehow feels more elegant than an entire Wedgwood collection. The graffiti artist who knows exactly which wall needs colour. The teenager mixing thrifted pieces into something that looks better than a runway show. These are not luxuries in the financial sense, but they are luxuries of vision, of imagination, of daring to arrange the world differently. And in some ways, that might be the most authentic form of taste, because it is not seeking approval but simply articulating a point of view.

Though, what complicates all of this is our digital age, where taste has become hyper-visible. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest have democratised taste in one sense — anyone can share their aesthetics, their outfits, their playlists — but they have also commodified it in another. Algorithms reward sameness; brands mine subcultures for trends before the subcultures have even solidified their identities. Suddenly, taste feels less like an instinct and more like an audition for attention. Taste is free to have, but expensive to sustain, because visibility requires the right tools, the right networks, the right consistency. In this sense, the internet has not dissolved the hierarchy of taste but merely accelerated its circulation.

And yet, within this hyper-visibility, I think there’s a paradox that the more accessible taste seems, the more “performative” it becomes. Online, every choice is scrutinised, every outfit photographed, every playlist or aesthetic mood-board subject to likes, shares, and comments. Taste is no longer simply about what delights the eye or the ear; it is about what travels, what signals relevance, what accumulates cultural capital in a scrollable feed. Micro-celebrities and influencers navigate this terrain with precision, learning to balance authenticity with marketability, individuality with trend-readiness. Even when someone posts what feels like a private and instinctive choice, it is immediately legible as content, or an image to be consumed, reproduced, and monetised. In other words, the digital age has made taste simultaneously more democratic and more performative: everyone can display it, but few can escape the pressures of spectacle. And the paradox deepens further when you realise that what gains traction is rarely the quietly intelligent, the subtle, or the experimental, but the visually arresting, the instantly sharable, the easily commodified. Taste becomes a game not of instinct but of attention, with visibility as its currency, and in that sense, even the most democratic platforms reproduce hierarchy, privileging those who know how to stage themselves in the right light at the right time.

However, it would be unfair to say that the digital age didn’t make taste paradoxically both more attainable and more exclusive. Anyone can post, curate, and proclaim their aesthetic online, yet the very act of being seen — of having your taste recognised, celebrated, or legitimised — requires a form of capital that is not evenly distributed. A teenager in a small town can have a flawless eye for style, music, or interior arrangement, but without the right network, devices, or social know-how, their taste may go unnoticed. Meanwhile, someone with access to photography, lighting, and followers can achieve the same “recognition” simply by presenting themselves in the right way. In other words, digital platforms have accelerated the circulation of taste, but they have not erased the underlying hierarchies; they have merely created new ones. Taste itself is free to feel, free to develop, free to experiment — but to have that taste matter, to have it seen, appreciated, and entered into the cultural conversation, often comes at a cost. Visibility has become its own luxury, and in this hyper-mediated world, it is both the proof of taste and a gatekeeper of it, a reminder that even the most democratic tools exist within structures of attention, influence, and social capital.

And so we circle back to the original question. Is taste a luxury? Yes, when it is canonised, when it is gatekept, when it is wielded as a signifier of class. No, when it emerges as instinct, as rebellion, as everyday arrangement. Perhaps the better answer is that taste is always both: an instinct that anyone can have, but a recognition that only some are permitted. To possess taste is free. To have taste matter — to be seen, remembered, recorded — is what costs.

Hence why I would call taste a paradoxical luxury. It is available to everyone in practice but not in prestige. The poor have always had taste, have always invented, have always rearranged the world into beauty. But only some taste is allowed into history books, onto museum walls, into glossy magazines. The rest remains ephemeral, lived, and fleeting. But maybe that is not such a grave tragedy. Perhaps the truest taste is not the one enshrined but the one felt, the private alignment of colours, sounds, and textures that make life more bearable. 

For me, much of my own taste comes from the myriad forms of media I consume and the places I have been lucky enough to travel to from films, music, literature, fashion, art, architecture, to cities I’ve wandered through alone or in company, exhibitions that have lingered in my mind for weeks. Since I was young, I think I’ve existed in a kind of creative abyss, constantly absorbing, constantly experimenting, learning to arrange fragments of experience into my own sense of order and delight. I have the luxury of experimentation, the freedom to explore without immediate consequence, and that freedom has shaped my sensibility in ways that no price tag could replicate. 

I’ve always been a big observer / visual person; the world imprints itself on me in shapes, colours, gestures, compositions, and textures. But I also believe taste demands action, not just passive absorption. You have to produce at least thrice what you consume, or else the mind becomes a kind of creative indigestion. To experience everything and not curate what you actually love is utter madness.

I like many things, eclectic things, even contradictory things — the kind of tastes that might seem scattered or incompatible on the surface. But to have taste, in my view, is not simply to like a lot; it is to like with intention, to recognise the particularities that move you at a granular level and to follow those threads with fidelity. It is about noticing the subtle textures, the tiny gestures, the colours, shapes, and sounds that resonate in ways that are almost ineffable, and allowing them to inform your choices in life, art, fashion, or music. Taste is cultivated, an accumulation of observation, reflection, and experimentation. It requires a form of self-discipline and willingness to be niche to yourself, to carve out a private world of preferences that may not always be legible to anyone else. It needs trust in your own eyes, even in the absence of recognition or applause, because the truest validation comes not from others, but from the clarity with which you understand your own vision. No one will ever see it better than you do, and that, paradoxically, is both isolating and liberating. To cultivate taste is to engage in a quiet lifelong dialogue with the world and with oneself, to navigate the tension between curiosity and discernment, between loving broadly and caring deeply about the specifics that define your sensibility. It is, ultimately, a practice of noticing, choosing, and inhabiting the world in a way that feels intimate, intentional, and unapologetically yours.

Sometimes, I look at people who claim to have “good taste,” and I wonder if it is vanity, performativism, or a genuine pursuit of beauty and refinement. There is often a performative element to these declarations: a desire to signal sophistication, to occupy a certain cultural space, or to be recognised as discerning by others. You can often sense when someone is inauthentic, when the choices they present are more about optics than about genuine engagement with what moves them. And yet, even in those moments, I do not judge. Most of the time, these people are simply navigating the vast and overwhelming landscape of culture, trying things out, feeling their way through what resonates, or following the currents of the mass wave of trends to figure out what they truly enjoy. There is something human in that; the process of discovering taste is inevitably messy, iterative, and socially mediated. Even if their choices are influenced by external validation or the desire to perform, they are still participating in the act of cultivation, still searching for the specificity that will one day feel uniquely theirs. Taste is rarely fully conscious — it is trial and error, intuition, and sometimes imitation — but over time, these explorations refine the eye, shape sensibilities, and produce glimpses of authenticity amid the noise. In that sense, even inauthenticity is a step on the path to self-defined taste, and a reminder that the cultivation of discernment is rarely immediate and never entirely separate from the world around us. 

Taste is an ongoing dialogue between desire, exposure, and discernment. At the end of the day, I think I am lucky to have been born with a good eye or a natural curiosity for the visual, but even this eye must be trained, sharpened, and challenged. Taste is never fully innate, as said, it is always a cultivation, a patient negotiation with the world, and a reminder that the most idiosyncratic visions are often the most valuable, even if no one else recognises them. In this sense, taste is both intimate and expansive: it is a private luxury born of curiosity and exposure, a quiet privilege that allows one to inhabit the world as a participant in its endless and improvisational beauty.

S xoxo

Written in Milan, Italy

7th September 2025