My mother was the first person to let me know that I had bad taste. I was a more-is-more child. I liked frills and glitter. I didn’t understand why my pale pink skirt didn’t ‘go with’ my bright pink t shirt. Pink was pink – and getting dressed was an excuse to wear as much of it as possible. When I was about eight, one Sunday morning I presented myself at the breakfast table in a fabulous original outfit – a red tartan dress with a white collar, which I’d technically outgrown a couple of years ago, styled with black opaque tights, and my white, open toed summer sandals.
I’d learned something, somewhere about mods – maybe I’d picked up a book that had been lying around, but it could have been an old Friday night repeat of Top Of The Pops, or even Thunderbirds. Something in my childish heart responded strongly to the geometry, the simplicity, the power of monochrome. And my poor mother had to tell me, gently, that I wasn’t really wearing the right clothes for a Catholic Mass in November.
Later, our relationship would become even more strained as Mum tried to protect me from my own body, and the world’s sexual interest in it – and her comments about my choices made me weep with frustration and shame. At the time, I thought she believed that everything I loved was an aesthetic catastrophe. I longed to be seen. I was desperate for her to endorse my taste. But I was also desperate for her to be more like the other Mums, in ruffled blouses and blue eyeshadow. She dressed very simply. She didn’t wear make-up. She didn’t even wear earrings. Just jeans, t shirts and crisp white cotton shirts.
Thirty plus years later, a few strange things have happened. Firstly, my mother frequently compliments my outfits. Secondly, her tastes have changed. Admittedly I’ve never seen her in pink, but she loves a frock. Thirdly, I look at old photos, and I covet her clothes. I’m much more likely to try to dress like my mother, in 1993, than to wear anything I’ve seen on Instagram.
We’re all angry about the algorithm. This is how I feel. I still want to dress like a mod. And Stevie Nicks. And every single character in Shampoo, including Warren Beatty in his cunty little scarves. If you need a style icon for the day, watch The Simpsons and look at Ruth Powers or Evelyn Peters or Disco Stu. Read about Talitha Getty or Eve Babitz or Betty Catroux or Yasmeen Ghauri or Renata Adler or Anita Pallenberg. Think about what your costume would be for Taskmaster, or what you’d wear if you were Petrova Fossil, dressed for a ‘avant-garde’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Search Ebay for vintage J Crew catalogues. Channel dear, misunderstood Janet in O Caledonia and find your purple ball gown.
Living online has made everything figuratively and literally beige. We’re in the throes of a taste crisis. In a piece for The Guardian, Rachel Aroesti wrote ‘We’re waking up to another sobering truth: [the internet] has wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences. In Grazia, Otegha Uwagba wrote ‘We’re all screenshotting, Instagramming, and saving the same things to our Pinterest boards, because we’re all getting our recommendations from the same influencers and celebrities.’
Arguably, The End Of Taste is an understandable and appropriate response to living conditions in 2026. For most of us, life seems frightening and unstable, globally, and locally. When I am online, I feel compromised, powerless, overwhelmed, exhausted, horribly complicit and broke. When we feel unsafe, the very last thing we want to do is stand out from the crowd. We want to be part of the huddle. My mother didn’t want me to wear revealing or exposing clothes because she wanted to protect me from predation. If you find yourself clicking on targeted ads for discounted beige cashmere, it might be because you’re searching for something that will make you feel safe.
I’ve been haunted by an observation made by Cathryn Horyn in a piece about Demna’s Spring/Summer Gucci collection. She explores the way that fashion has always been textured and filled with references, mythologising art, literature and fashion itself. Other designers create for the future by considering the past. But Demna is making clothes for bright young things who don’t give a shit about any of it. Horyn writes ‘In her debut at Fendi, Maria Grazia Chiuri invoked the five Fendi sisters, who worked with Karl Lagerfeld. But what can any of that history mean to a young person today?’ Are we wringing our hands over the notion that the youth have no respect for fashion heritage? Or is their enthusiastic response to Demna’s ‘boom-boom’ Gucci aesthetic no different from mine, when I was a little girl who wanted to wear all of her pink clothes at once?
At the end of 2024, the trend forecaster Sean Monahan announced the arrival of ‘boom-boom’ and suggested that the great prevailing fashion trend was simply spending money, and lots of it. ‘Boom-boom’ might be the acme of vulgarity, but it’s a safe choice for a dangerous time. The bad guys are in charge, and cash is the only thing they respect. Be gaudy, be flashy, be bright. Practise your animal aposematism and let your potential predators know that you’re too poisonous to eat.
By May, you could see it at the Met Gala. Arguably, it’s mad to pretend that the Met Gala has ever been about anything but money, celebrity and power. But this is the first year when there wasn’t a single outfit that delighted me, not one photograph that took my breath away. The sense of theatre and the possibility of anarchy seemed wholly absent from proceedings. It felt like a trip to the cinema without the movie, only advertisements that ran and ran.
I want to reclaim bad taste – or maybe, I just want to reclaim my taste. We can’t avoid the impact of Instagram and TikTok any more than we can avoid a fart in an elevator, or cerulean blue. To generalise wildly, humans love visuals and videos, we want to acquire more stuff, and we’re lazy. These platforms have been designed to exploit our nature, and sell to us all day long. The revolution was monetised, long ago. It is not the time to demand that everyone moves to a signal-less patch of Welsh countryside and learns how to spin their own yarn. I might as well suggest that we all go and live in 1975.
We could start by challenging the word ‘tasteful’. It suggests muted elegance, something understated, and paired back. A ‘tasteful’ women knows the difference between beige and ecru, and can dress in either without immediately falling into a vat of jam. I think of Diane Keaton in Father Of The Bride, or Kay Thompson as the black clad fashion editor in Funny Face. We need to make taste tasty. Strong, pungent, possibly a little polarising. We can’t excite, delight or inspire when we’re simply trying not to offend.
But I think lots of us are longing to dress for ourselves and think for ourselves. When did you last feel inspired – charged by inspiration, high on it, overwhelmed by a kind of energetic bliss that came from looking upwards and outwards? Do you remember being a kid, and caring deeply about a party dress, a Snoopy tee, or a particular pair of jeans? Do you remember the first time you saw a bright red poppy against a blue sky, or watched Audrey Hepburn extinguishing a fire with a flick of someone else’s wrist, or heard the first bit of the aria in Goldberg Variations? Do you remember how it felt?
What would it be like to recreate those feelings and bring them back to the way you dress, and the way you live? To stop playing it safe and start simply…playing it? I dare you to rebel, and wear something that simply brings you joy – and notice whether that directs you to find more joy in art, music, literature, relationships and life itself.
Love
Daisy x
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