One thing that kids know how to do so much better than adults is to trust their own personal taste. When you were a kid, you had no concept of the things you loved needing to be validated by others first – you just knew you loved them. You knew exactly what you wanted to wear each day, much to your mother’s dismay if it was completely seasonally inappropriate; you freely became obsessed with something and dove head-first into exploring it without ever wondering why. You just did. Your taste for things was entirely individual and real because it came from you, your expression as authentic as it could be.
In our algorithm-led digital milieu, we’ve lost this process of organic discovery simply because we are all fed the same stuff, all the time. Take one walk around your city and you see everyone wearing the same shoes, scroll down your Instagram feed and everyone’s posting the same photo dumps, the same angles, jumping onto the same trends. It’s very easy to get stuck in an echo chamber without realising it, because you start genuinely liking the things it serves you – its taste becomes your taste, so it doesn’t feel inauthentic to you, you just feel like part of a whole. But when we lose the ability to trust what we feel naturally drawn to, or the ability to even see what that is in the first place, we lose touch with who we are. Our personal expression isn’t really personal, because there’s nothing really individual about it.
When we witness someone who expresses themselves in a way that’s genuinely unique, that you can’t compare to what’s trending on social media, it might feel like we’re starting to sense something we’re missing. Some people then default to trying to copy what that person is doing instead; their authenticity becomes aspirational, and it’s easy to think that in order to exude the same vibe, all you have to do is like what they like, wear what they wear, express yourself in the way they do. But of course, their energy isn’t the way it is because of the things they like. It’s the way it is because genuinely authentic expression shines differently. We’re instantly drawn to people who are their own centre of taste, who trust their own judgement more than they do algorithms. Confidence, self-trust, our sense of self and our personal taste are all interlinked. When we’ve forgotten how to trust ourselves and listen to what we truly like, it’s up to us to rebuild that one small decision at a time, by giving weight to our instincts without needing to justify them or get them externally validated.
I remember seeing a girl online who was doing a series on how her personal style was changing every day after she deleted all social media. She documented her before-and-after: her style on algorithms vs. her style when her only influence was her own intuition and judgement. As you can imagine, the change was significant: without our echo chambers, we become more of ourselves, and that’s a beautiful thing! We should all be striving to become more and more of who we are; I see it as one of the fundamental journeys we go through in life, one that is so worthwhile. Shedding the noise of how you think you should express yourself, and reconnecting with the instinct that led you so naturally when you were a kid, the part of you that knows what it likes and gets joy out of embracing it.
If you’re not sure where to start, I’ll share some of my favorite ways to get back in touch with the intuitive taste that’s fully yours, and to see whether there are identities you have been giving yourself that might be limiting. I’ll also show you a sneak peek into my own visual moodboards and how I bring to the surface the patterns that keep emerging.
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