There’s been a lot of talk lately about taste as the one currency AI can’t replicate. It’s made me return to a question I’ve been circling for years: what does taste actually mean, and how did I arrive at my own definition of it?
I grew up in a world where “good taste” was performed constantly. I’ve spent decades in fashion and film, two industries that worship it, commodify it, and routinely confuse it with consumption. And yet the longer I’ve worked inside that world, the more certain I’ve become of something that cuts against its entire premise: taste has nothing to do with what you own, wear, buy, read, or watch.
The moments in my life when I’ve walked into someone’s space, a spare apartment, an overstuffed room, a stranger’s wardrobe, and felt that wordless recognition, this person has taste, it was never about the objects. Not the chair. Not the vase. Not whether they were wearing The Row or Céline. Not whether they were reading the right books or listening to the right podcasts or using the right words. It was a feeling. The feeling of walking into someone’s heart and history and encountering a life where the self and the objects and choices around it are in complete alignment.
Yes, I’ve walked into homes with beautiful wood paneling, the right marble in the bathrooms, the right art on the walls, the perfect white sofa, a hostess dressed in all white. On the surface, that has all the elements and signals of good taste, and sure, those can be some of the pillars. But those elements are only the brushes. The actual art of good taste goes deeper.
Because alignment with self is not passive. It takes discipline. Research. Experience. It takes connecting to your own joy and your own pain. It takes vulnerability, humility, real mistakes, the courage of transformation, long stretches of solitude, the clarity that comes from struggle. Self-doubt, survived.
Good taste, in other words, is not an aesthetic. It is a practice of self-knowledge expressed outward. I have found from experience that when self-knowledge is expressed authentically, in its purest form, it usually ends with something beautiful, and beauty can take so many forms.
This is also why it’s so hard to hold onto commercially. When you’re an independent brand under pressure to grow quickly, the economics push hard toward the mass market. Mass market means legibility. Legibility means simplifying the feeling until it becomes a signal, until it becomes the chair, the vase, the label. And something essential gets lost in that compression.
I don’t believe you have to compromise taste for commercial value. But it takes more time. A feeling can’t be quickly communicated or sold. It has to be nurtured, layer by layer, until the person on the other side of it recognizes something true.
The only times in my life I’ve looked at someone and thought I want to be that, not their clothes, not their life, but something more essential, it was always the same thing I was responding to. Alignment. A person living in full coherence with themselves. Great artists have it. You recognize it immediately, and you can’t fake it.
So good taste is not aspiration toward an external image. It is the long, difficult work of becoming legible to yourself and then, if you’re lucky, finding the objects, the clothes, the rooms, the words that say it back. That is what I have always been trying to make. It has taken a long time, and it’s work that never actually ends.
It has taken me this long, fifteen years of building CO, and the whole life that ran alongside it, to arrive at a place where I am no longer confused about which path to take. No longer susceptible to the wrong one. I know myself well enough now to see there is only one path for me: the one where the work comes first. Not work as productivity or output, work as a constant choosing, toward the most authentic and aligned version of myself. No matter how difficult. No matter how many times I fail. No matter the financial compromises. No matter the struggle required to get there.
And I know this with the same certainty: when I do not choose this path, I betray myself. And when I betray myself, I confuse everyone around me. The work becomes illegible. The clothes become noise. The writing meaningless.
To arrive at alignment, I first had to live in misalignment and stay there long enough to understand what it was costing me. I designed clothes that didn’t represent who I am. I was with men who didn’t reflect my values. I lived in places where I felt fundamentally misunderstood. I bought things that had nothing to do with what I actually believed. I tried and failed, over and over, sometimes quietly, sometimes devastatingly.
That is not a detour. That is the path.
Because real taste, the kind that comes from the inside out, is not something you arrive at through clarity. You arrive at it through elimination. You peel the onion, layer by layer, not knowing how many layers remain. You keep peeling until you die. That, to me, is the purpose of life. Not a destination, a practice of constant distillation and transformation.
Transformation is hard, but I have never believed that easy things are the ones worth having. It is the hard things we remember, the ones we had to fight for, the ones that cost us something real. The struggle is not incidental to the meaning. It is the meaning. And the objects, the clothes, the rooms we build from that place, they carry it. People feel it when they walk in, read it, see it, wear it. They can’t always name it. But they feel it.
That is taste. To me.
