11.28.24 - A brief theory of "taste" (and why dudes wear boxy shirts)
I recently had an experience during this holiday season when I was just deeply affected by ugliness.
In generaly, as a I get older, I am becoming less and less tolerant of ugliness, disorder, tackiness. I feel physical repulsion to these things. I can't take it.
I'm not a particulary artsy or trendy guy, if you saw me in real life. I'm a busy student, I live in a studio apartment, and I'm not dressing to impress
But I do think I have some level of taste. My color choices have some level of balance, my furniture matches and my clothes don't clash. In general, my outfits trend towards a timeless/effortless look, like a quarterzip and slacks with a clean pair of shoes. My apartment is comfortable and has some charm to it. Here and there I add in a dash of something new, something that someone makes a point to compliment. In my estimation, this baseline of respect for custom with a modest independent streak is what amounts to "taste." Not trendiness. Taste. I think I do this to signal some respect for the world around me and to contribute to order, to resist deeply entropic forces that undergird our reality. Taste is a combination of preservation and innnovation. So when I detect a lack of taste in others, it makes me respect them less.
Is this just because I'm shallow? I don't think so, and when talking to a friend I tried to partially articulate why:
I think this makes sense. Taste strikes us the way a harmony betwee notes does. It's a gut feeling. When I se someone with a big gucci logo on a sweater and some super tight pants and some trendy sneakers, I just think that guy is a just a bit goofy, probbaly fine, but not a serious or discriminating individual. I already know a lot about who they are. If I see a girl with white air forces and those horrible fitting whitewash jeans and a tank from Shein (I think I'm describing the outfit right), I know she's basic and PROBBALY has little to contribute in the ways of ideas etc.
But I would go so far as to say that how you relate to trends signals how much you can think outside of a certain time. I would even go as far as to say that its a proxy on how you relate to social trends –––maybe it signals how much you would have gone along with nazism or the cultural revolution.
But it would be way too far (and probably fascist) to equate aesthetics with morality. For instance, I think you can probably look a little frumpy and still be tasteful. Maybe I'm trying to stretch my definitions too much, but it makes sense in my head. I'll offer some examples.
I think Slavoj Zizek, who is not a very good looking man, but a charming one, wears these baggy shirts and wrinkled polos, is tasteful in a weird way. I mean,he can try and look like this idaf academic, but his taste and internal sense of balance just cant help but shine through. Go on google images, look him up. The colors he puts together never feel wrong. It's never jarring. There's a harmony in the frumpiness. It never looks tacky.
Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, who I think at a time looked tasteful, is increasingly bordering on "wacky" as of late. When he was pushing the boundaries, but still respectful of the general customs of his discpline, and was just a slightly unorthodox public intellectual, he was in that sweet spot of respect for custom/innovation, and I think his clothing reflected that "taste." He was a tastemaker, and he had taste. Look up Jordan Peterson 2018. Conservative, with some intersting choices here and there on tie color. Tasteful. But now look at pictures of him from 2024. As he's embraced a more conspiratorial mindset, and he's become more "trendy," he's starting to look wacky. The suits are getting weird. Trying too hard. The ideas he's espousing now, unlike his original palette, aren't timeless——they're the product of a very weird and very NOW confluence of political trends. And his clothes are becoming less timeless at the same time. I actually don't think they look "bad," some of the weird patterned suits are actually kind of cool, but they are not tasteful. In short, I wouldn't trust this man with any kind of authority. As you leave tasteful and enter wacky, you become more of an art piece. Like someone at paris fashion week. Nice to look at, introduces some cool new ideas, but you would never wear that! Those designs are not "leading" you.
Do you see what I mean? Recognizing taste is something like a proxy for leadership qualities.
Going to another public figure that I think illustrates the idea of taste well, we can talk about Kanye West, who basically constantly oscillates between tasteful and wacky (but never, ever, TACKY). Yeah he'll wear absolutely ridiculous statement pieces here and there, but you'll also see him walking around and STUNT in an outfit that you would wear to the grocery store. He'll wear a very normal jeans, shirt, sneaker combo, but with a slightly new cut/fit that makes it feel extremely fresh. That's taste––THAT's combining respect for custom with innovation–—that's when you get a glimmer of his actual leadership qualities
//an aside: regardless of what you think of him, Ye is a tastemaker, he leads the industry, fashion and music follows what he does in so many ways. Do you know why dudes are wearing those baggy Tees these days that are loose around the arms? Its because Kanye West got fat for a while and changed the cut of his clothes to be more flattering. This was reflected in his merch and the yeezy line. That sillhouette, as with many of his yeezy designs in the past, gets picked up by the fast fashion brands like Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, and then regular guys buy them. Next time you go the bar and see some 27 year old dude in one of those oversized boxy Ts, know its basically entirely because Kanye West was on lexapro for some time and gained weight. I'm on the internet a lot and I pay attention. This is exactly what happened.//
Anyways, Kanye has taste, and sometimes throws it out the window for the sake of art or maybe he loses it in his occasional manic episodes.
But to wrap this up, what does taste tell us, why do we have a warm feeling to outfits that respect custom while modestly innovating? Why are we drawn to people who dress like that/reflect that ethos in other parts of their life, like how they decorate their apartment? Because we are drawn to leaders. And leadership is not about completely disregarding or opposing what has come before, and its not about just following a template. It's about having a deep sense of intuition of just how hard and how fast you can push the envelope, how you can push society forward without destablizing it. That's why taste looks different at different times, and different periods will have different paramaters for how much you can innovate while still being tasteful. If society is in decline/failure mode, something quite innovative and fresh and different may feel tasteful. If its doing okay, I would venture to say that people have a lower tolerance for innovation in style, and any fresh elements in an outfit will have to be much more modest.
But because people have different senses of how much things are working, they have different paramaters for taste. Which is why fashion is political. The way people artsy people in say, Richmond, Virginia, dress can sometimes feel ridiculous and tacky to me, but is tasteful in a leftist-social context where people feel like society is literally collapsing. And we all know of outfit combos which are a proxy for much more conservative politics (the frat-fit, the investment banker fit, the quarterzip khakis fit . . . also, FWIW, I think that the Gen Z draw towards "quiet luxury" is another signal that we're trending conservative as a culture). Anyways . . . "and so on and so on." That's all I should probably say, even though I have more. I hate ugliness, I hate tackiness. I want to be tasteful. And now I think I have articulated why.
knxnts