On the Question of Taste
I was recently at lunch with a friend here in L.A. and we were bemoaning how lately everyone—everywhere—seems to dress the same. (Not for nothing but we both showed up in oversized button downs and loafers.) It’s not a new complaint: I wrote about this ages ago (2016, yikes) for Vogue (in an essay I seem to site increasingly frequently), about how the then top celebrity stylists were putting all the it girlies in the same candy colored ab-baring sets. Now they’re doing the same thing but with camel coats and headbands and gray flannel and black leather jackets and starched shirts. And look: I’m just as guilty of looking like I rolled out of a ‘90s J. Crew catalogue as anyone. I love my big trousers and big shirts and slouchy sweaters and jeans. (I do, as a person who came of age during the WB Gossip Girl years, draw the line at a headband.) I think the problem is the monotony of it. My friend and I came to the conclusion that it’s social media’s fault (surprise! It’s always social media’s fault!): When everyone is so inundated with images all the time telling them what’s good and bad and how other people are doing it, it’s hard not to let some of that seep in and affect your eye. Sometimes it’s good— you learn a new styling trick! You’re inspired!— sometimes it’s maybe not so good— you lose sight of what you actually liked before other people got involved and told you their way was the right/only one. And then retailers and brands make available only more of what they think you want, and then everyone is in shades of beige and black and gray, with the exact same shoes on. At a party! It’s all so inoffensively “tasteful” I could spit.
Taste is a funny thing, right? Necessarily subjective, deeply personal, perpetually offered up for the judgment of others. Diana Vreeland had that famous quote: "A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I'm against.” And that isn’t even the same DV quote I used in the Vogue story. (Really I think I was more fed up in the Vogue story; certainly I had more energy on the topic. But look, I think in general I probably had more energy in 2016.) Not that it matters: the topic of taste has been a steady source of inspirational bon mots since well before Mme Vreeland’s time. Either way, I agree with her—I always love talking to someone who loves something I don’t “get.” Give me a dresser who loves weird color combos and clashing patterns over a future spent sifting through a sea of slicked buns and camel cashmere any day. (And I LOVE camel cashmere!) Give me somebody who loves the book/podcast/art show I loathed, and can really tell me why without fighting about it or trying to convert me to it. Give me someone I can learn something from. A girl wants to grow!
Anyway this all came up again when I saw this very good 2019 Slate piece by Willa Paskin about The Morning Show surface online. It’s very good and quite funny and it takes a brief interlude into the other side of "bad taste,” when you don’t totally understand that it is, in fact, bad, which feels like an important point, too:
Bad taste, like a bellybutton, is something everyone has. To be human is to love unwisely but too well, to be thrilled, satisfied by the middling thing that hits the spot, whether it’s a movie or a partner. It’s bad taste, fine taste, whatever taste, not good taste, that makes us singular, particular, human. (Who only loves good things? It’s too boring to contemplate!) While we could hardly be accused of living in an era of good taste, we are living in a moment where we have elevated bad taste to the point that it no longer functions with any self-effacement. Bad taste no longer knows that it’s not that good.
No one should feel bad about the things they love or feel guilty about their pleasures, wherever they find them—but I do think we should try to remain aware that personal pleasure is not an exact equivalent to quality. Love what you love, but try to see it clear.
This gets to the other part of the same worry, which is a world in which people scream themselves hoarse over differing opinions in something as personal and pointless to argue over as taste. (See: “Stan” culture; out-of-proportion celebrity responses to criticism; Very Online Taylor Swift/ Selena Gomez/ Ariana Grande/ Nicki Minaj fans...)
My partner sent me this excellent essay from Will Leitch’s substack the other day, which focuses on a TikTok famous artist with plenty of IRL successes (he met President Biden! Also, for some reason, Jared Leto!) who went on the attack when an art critic dared to… critique his art. We’re at an interesting (i.e. awful) place culturally when people simply cannot tolerate a differing opinion about a painting.
But I am not a TikTok famous artist. I have only ever made one TikTok and it lives in my Draft folder and looks like this:
And I will not be hearing any criticism about it, actually.
But! Back to the matter at hand. From Will Leitch:
I think it’s actually … a lot larger phenomenon than just the world of art. I think the Internet has given people such tunnel vision that they have persuaded themselves that every complimentary thing said about them is inherently correct and right and perfect, and every uncomplimentary thing said about them is a lie created by a monster explicitly intent on destroying them. I think they believe negative things said about them shouldn’t exist at all.
[This leads to a long aside about Pat McAfee, a person I can confidently report that I know next to know nothing about but seems wholly relevant to his argument, if not immediately to ours. ]
It is ultimately revealing of a fundamental truth in this age of influencer art and follower counts and clout, of handing over time, space, money and power to those who are the loudest and most relentless rather than the ones who actually have something to say: All they have to sell are themselves. There is no art, no insight, no unique perspective. They have just The Brand Called Them. That’s why they sell themselves so relentlessly, really exclusively, and why every sell that they can’t make feels like a failure, and thus one that must be punished.
That’s all [they] have to stand on—all they have to offer. And thus they are so myopic that they they see anyone who wants something other than what they’re selling, who might dare tell them that there are in fact things to sell other than themselves, as someone launching a personal attack on them—a threat. If Martin Scorsese makes a movie that someone doesn’t like, well, you can point at the movie and say “I don’t like that thing.” If Zadie Smith writes a book you don’t like, you can say, “I liked her old stuff more.” Those are things they have put into the world, the reason we know and care about them in the first place; their work is fair game, something they inherently understand.
It really is worth reading the whole thing.
It’s worth thinking about who we celebrate and why, as well as our own tolerance for other people’s differences (of opinion, and otherwise). It’s worth sitting in the discomfort of disagreement and really wading through it, rather than simply shutting it down or running for the safety of an echo chamber. (Let’s be honest, wading through it is increasingly the only hope we have left.)
But hey. Perhaps you’re here for something else? Like some excellent things to read and watch and see and wear? Here we go!
Speaking of questionable taste, I have been watching this season of The Morning Show (on Apple+) after never having seen The Morning Show before and honestly I can’t tell you why. Because a character goes to space and to the capital on Jan 6th in the span of two episodes? Because Las Culturistas and Who Weekly are so funny when they talk about it? Because I’m on deadline and I like making things harder for myself? Anyone’s guess!
And like a bull in a cowboy’s lasso (lol?) it happened. They got me. Yellowstone finally got me. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. I’m a season and a half in. Send help. (Not really, but do send me a horse and a plot of land outside Bozeman please.) Sorry not sorry but it’s a perfect, easy fall show (/ soap opera, let’s be honest, we’re all friends here, it is a soap!). I got hooked on a long plane ride back from New York and while it is perhaps at its ideal viewing at a high altitude with low expectations, I also enjoy it at home in LA. Perhaps this is because in L.A. there is very little evidence that it’s actually November, and in Yellowstone world it seems to always be a perfect autumn day in Montana, and everyone is good looking and snarly and clad entirely in RRL and increasingly ridiculous heaps of silver and turquoise. Could do without the occasional outrageous acts of violence but that’s Taylor Sheridan’s Wild Wild West I guess! Anyways it’s all so campy that it’s not that distressing. (On Peacock.)
In more Montana news, though of a much gentler sort, my friend Annie Starke’s delightfully wholesome (and delicious) home cooking show The Mountain Kitchen is now airing on Sundays on Max. She’s as funny and sweet on screen as she is IRL and if it doesn’t make you want to move to a ranch and get some chickens I don’t know what will. (It’s also full of beautiful delicious food that I can’t wait to make.) Highly recommend. (Hugo is also a fan.) (On Max and Prime!)
I started working with this British brand Me + Em and I am a little obsessed with the mentality behind it, which is classic/ forever stuff that always works and always looks great but definitely isn’t boring / the same things everyone else has. (What’s not to love?) This navy blue three piece suit?! These crystal strapped velvet party flats?!!!! This scarf tied sequin swing top?!!!!!!! (This wide legged trouser with sequin tuxedo stripe is also v. important and probably the thing I’ve already worn the most after the shoes.) My god. I love when a company solves my holiday party dressing questions before I’ve even asked them.
On the more everyday tack, über-stylist Kate young collaborated with Splendid on a very chic little capsule collection. I got the screen printed silk separates which include trousers that feel like pajamas and look like hard pants. The matching top is genius because it tucks into jeans like a dream and has this Tom Ford for Gucci era sheen to it. There’s also excellent outerwear that’s a perfect L.A. winter weight, or east coast fall. Five stars.
A clip of Ushio Shinohara working came up on my FYP recently. His process involves punching a canvas with boxing gloves daubed in paint, which has always seemed delightfully cathartic to me, as art goes.
It reminded me how much I loved Zachary Heinzerling’s 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, about Shinohara and his wife Noriko, which is also a meditative treatise about love and art and marriage and living as artists in New York from the late 70s to the mid aughts, with all the attendant sacrifices involved. As relevant now as ever, even if their version of Dumbo is largely unrecognizable today, with no easy answers about living as (and with) creative people with creative temperaments, jealousies, and serious devotions to their craft (gloves or no).
Other things! I went to Rationale for a facial and am thrilled by the results. They’re an Australian brand who’ve just made the jump to the States, and they use these high-tech scanners to analyze your skin before they do your facial, and then then suggest products to take home and use daily from there. (I am always terrified of those age-filter scare tactics but am pleased to report that they make it a pleasant experience and that my daily SPF 50 routine has been working!) I’ve been using their line (two cleansers, three serums, a day and night cream) for a few weeks now and I have to say, I’m really impressed. They have a location on Melrose place, in L.A., and are opening soon in New York, I think. I recommend a try, if you’re fed up with or not seeing results from your current routine. I felt like I was in great hands, got all of my questions answered, and left with a glow, that never happens at the same time.
I co-hosted an event for Nina Runsdorf here last week with the jewelry consultancy The Stax— who just now has launched a Substack of their own! for the sparkle-inclined—and really just wanted everything. But especially this very cool rosewood collection. So louche and 70s. Hot.
Based on this review, I will be reading Barbra Streisand’s memoir. All 970 pages. Don’t worry, it’s only 48 hours on audiobook! (Help.)
I have become a salted black licorice person, I have no idea how. (I think partially through this tea, which I love, especially for any stomach ailments; it has licorice root in it.) Are you a similar little freak? Send any recommendations of favorite kinds if so, please! I just tore through a bag of Gustaf’s Dutch Licorice coins that I bought at a liquor store here. My review: excellent taste, but maybe a little too firm. Take that into consideration with your suggestions.
A very good (and easy, and light) thing to make for dinner: Ginger-Scallion Steamed Fish. Excellent with rice and some charred broccoli and a two ingredient salad that’s basically half cilantro.
A quietly devastating poem, by David Ferry.
A beautiful little essay (from The Paris Review) about reading as a young person, and how precious and pivotal those experiences are.
In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one; and how you find the book, and when, and precisely where you are when you read it—these things matter enormously. The quality of the light, the mood at home, the facts of material circumstance, so normalized as to be both total and unconscious—in childhood these are as much the experience of the text as is the text in itself. The book and the situation in which you read it form a single weather, and this weather contains you—it enfolds you, as Walter Benjamin writes in the fragment “Child reading,” “as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snow.” It’s easy to think, then, that there is some aspect of yourself still sitting, mittened and suited up, strangely warm, in that same falling snow; still turning the pages, even now. And to think, too, that this is true no matter how ridiculous, or desolate, or paranoid, or merely competent the book—in the light or dark of your adult present—now appears. Or maybe it’s this: that your hunch of the book’s smell—its noumenon, if I may—is in some strange way bound up in an awareness of your own.
A giggle, courtesy of Werner Herzog.
If you haven’t seen Killers of the Flower Moon yet… well, what’s stopping you? It’s worth finding the time to see it in theaters on a big screen. (Also, it’s really not as long as all that.) Lily Gladstone has this quiet magnetism to her that I haven’t seen on screen in a long time. I hope she gets real recognition (and other roles!) for it. That said, I still think that I prefer the book. (My interview with its author David Grann, here, if you're new!) Either is a very interesting complement to Yellowstone, that’s for sure…
That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’m winging my way to a friend’s destination wedding as we speak, and will be back soon with recommendations for you from the Yucatán and beyond. As always, thanks for being here, and drop me a note if you feel like it, or if there’s anything you want me to talk about/ find for you next time. I don’t know about you but these days I take great pleasure in problems I can actually solve.
I hope you’re well, and being gentle to yourself and others. It’s not just you, the times are unprecedentedly awful (again) and they’re making us all feel insane. We’ll get through it and find something beautiful on the other side. I’m sending you love.