Who Gets To Have Taste?

There is a strange thing we do with fashion: we talk about taste as though it were an individual instinct. You either have it or you don't.

Someone knows how to dress. Another one doesn't. One person looks effortlessly chic and sophisticated; another looks desperate and tacky. These judgments are usually delivered as though they are objective observations rather than opinions shaped by decades of social conditioning.

But who decided what good taste looks like in the first place?

And more importantly: who gets to decide?Taste Was Never Neutral

Taste has always been connected to class. What we describe as individual preference is often influenced by the social environments we grow up in. The clothes we wear, even the things we consider beautiful, can function as signals of where we belong.

And fashion is particularly good at turning these signals into hierarchies.

A logo can be vulgar. A discreet fabric can be sophisticated. A perfectly pressed shirt can suggest discipline. A distressed T-shirt can suggest cultural knowledge. A certain pair of shoes can tell someone that you know a particular scene exists. None of these meanings are naturally embedded in the objects themselves. They are learned. And once enough people agree on a certain code, it starts looking like common sense.

The Difference Between Taste And Style

The distinction between taste and style matters.

Personal style is not necessarily elitist. Someone can dress strangely, cheaply, loudly, traditionally, badly, brilliantly, or completely outside the current fashion conversation. Style is fundamentally about how someone chooses to present themselves.

However, “good taste” is different. It implies a standard.

It suggests that some choices are inherently better than others and that there are people qualified to recognize the difference. That qualification doesn't always come from money. It can come from education, cultural exposure, proximity to fashion, knowledge of art, familiarity with certain designers, or simply spending enough time inside a particular social environment.

This is what makes taste such an effective form of cultural capital. You don't necessarily need to own the expensive thing. But you need to know why the expensive thing matters.

When Everyone Knows The Code

This is where fashion's old system starts to break down.

Traditionally, cultural knowledge had a scarcity value. Knowing about a particular designer, archive piece, restaurant, artist, or subculture before everyone else gave you an advantage. It demonstrated that you belonged somewhere.

However, things have changed, and the internet has made much of that knowledge searchable. TikTok can explain why a particular designer matters in thirty seconds. Instagram can show you the archive. Depop can sell you the piece. Reddit can tell you the history. Within hours, something that once took years of participation to discover can become common knowledge.

And the result is strange. Everyone has access to the vocabulary, but knowing the vocabulary isn't the same thing as having a point of view.

The Internet Didn't Kill Gatekeeping

The concept of gatekeeping has also changed. Fashion used to have obvious gatekeepers: editors, buyers, critics, designers, institutions, and wealthy consumers. Now these gatekeepers are becoming less visible.

Algorithms hold the decision of what gets repeated. Influencers choose which references become desirable. Communities decide who is “authentic.” Comment sections judge whether someone is wearing something correctly. And niche online communities can be just as aggressive about policing taste as the institutions they replaced.

The Problem With “Tacky”

Few words reveal fashion's class politics better than tacky.

Calling something tacky sounds harmless. Often, it is simply a personal reaction. But the word can also function as a way of saying: You don't understand the rules.

The funny thing is that fashion constantly changes those rules.

What was vulgar becomes iconic. What was sophisticated turns boring. What began in a subculture gets absorbed by luxury. What was once considered embarrassing eventually becomes archive.

Logomania was vulgar until it became vintage. Tracksuits were low culture until luxury houses started selling them. Sneakers were once associated with sport and street culture; now they can cost more than formal shoes ever did.

The “rules” are not fixed. They are negotiated.

Taste Can Be Learned

If taste is socially constructed, that doesn't mean it is fake.

People genuinely develop sensitivity toward clothing. They learn proportion, fabrication, construction, history, references, and context. They develop an eye.

But there is a difference between developing taste and performing taste. The first takes time. The second takes a moodboard.

And social media has made performing taste incredibly easy. A person can know every current designer, own the right references, and reproduce the correct visual language without necessarily developing an individual relationship with any of it.

This is partly why the internet's obsession with aesthetics can feel so exhausting. Everything has become legible.

Who Gets To Break The Rules?

Perhaps the clearest evidence that taste is connected to hierarchy is the way we respond when people break fashion's rules.

Some people are described as eccentric, while others are described as badly dressed. And the difference is rarely just the outfit. It is often the person wearing it.

A wealthy or culturally established person can wear something bizarre and have it interpreted as intentional. Someone without that social credibility can make the same choice and be dismissed as clueless.

Recent conversations about taste have returned to this exact problem: cultural fluency gives certain people more freedom to violate the rules because their position already establishes that they understand them.

In other words, you are allowed to break a rule more easily when people already believe you know the rule.

So Who Gets To Have Taste?

Everyone.

Taste should not belong to the people who grew up around galleries, luxury boutiques, fashion schools, or expensive wardrobes. It shouldn't require a particular postcode, income bracket, or family background.

But pretending that taste has nothing to do with those things is equally dishonest.

When access shapes exposure, which shapes knowledge, which shapes confidence, the same confidence quite often gets mistaken for innate taste.

The interesting future of fashion might therefore not be about destroying the idea of taste altogether. It might be about questioning who gets to define it.

Because the most interesting people in fashion have rarely been the ones who perfectly followed the rules.

They are usually the ones who understand the rules well enough to ignore them.

And maybe that is the difference between having good taste and simply knowing what good taste is supposed to look like.