The Death of Bad Taste: Why We All Dress, Look, and Think the Same

Walk into a trendy, minimalist coffee shop in Makati and changes are, you’ll see the exact same man. Oversized Japanese workwear, Salomon trail shoes (never worn on actual dirt), and wire-rimmed glasses. He loves obscure A24 films, lives in a deliberately messy condo filled with unread Haruki Murakami paperbacks and a retro Marshall speaker.

Travel outside Makati or sanitised BGC and he vanishes. Yet, inside his bubble, this man represents the peak of good taste.

In reality, he just uses the same curated Instagram moodboards and lifestyle blogs as everyone else.

We are surrounded by clones like him in our city’s hippest pockets. But is treating a social media feed like an instruction manual really what taste is all about?

What is taste, anyway?

We can only really describe taste by looking at what it does. In 1964, writer Susan Sontag argued that taste is active and wild. You cannot just subscribe to it. You cannot build it by group agreement. When you force a personal feeling into a neat system, it stops being a genuine feeling.

Long before that, the philosopher Montesquieu wrote that taste is not about book smarts. It is about applying rules quickly and subtly without even thinking about them.

True taste takes effort. You must make choices. Following a trend is not taste, just as quoting Shakespeare does not make you an author. Taste loses its magic the moment it becomes a neat, packaged formula.

Following a trend is not taste, just as quoting Shakespeare does not make you an author.

Today, we treat taste like a product. We think you either have it or you do not. We think this way because we are lazy, and we owe that laziness to the Algorithm. Suddenly, we had too much music, fashion, and film at our fingertips. The endless options paralysed us. We built the Algorithm to sort the mess. Then, the Algorithm took over our lives.

At first, we worried that algorithms would turn everything into a boring, grey middle ground. People without their own style have always used standard rules to blend in. Now, automated feeds are the easiest rules in history. Spotify shuffles our music so we never have to choose. TikTok feeds us endless loops of neat, safe videos.

Yet, the problem is not just the Algorithm. We also have “cool” newsletters and anti-trend blogs. There is nothing wrong with these blogs; their creators are genuine tastemakers. But being against the Algorithm is now a trend in itself. People follow anti-algorithm blogs the exact same way they follow mainstream feeds. That is not real taste. It is why everything feels slightly wrong today. Everyone cares deeply about their image, but no one is actually original.

Why do we dress for our internet echo chambers?

We live in a split culture. Objects and clothes now wear heavy social badges:

• Gucci loafers are dead to fans of “quiet luxury,” but city bankers wear them like trophies.
• Bleached eyebrows signal an underground rave club just as easily as a personal breakdown.
• Wired headphones are worn not for sound quality, but to project an image of sensitive nostalgia.

Technology drives these extreme differences. When you show a tiny preference for something online, the system drags you into a bubble. You quickly find thousands of people who agree with you. The Algorithm did not create one giant, boring monocultures as we feared. Instead, it carved our style into tiny, guarded voting districts.

We can blame tech companies for dulling our brains, but we also let them do it. We forgot what we actually like because we stopped explaining why we like things. We handed that job over to social media.

To be seen as someone with good taste online, you must be easy for others to read.

In 1981, philosopher Jean Baudrillard explained this trap. When filters rule our lives, we start valuing the image of reality more than reality itself. We read books in public just to be seen reading. We run marathons just to post our running times online. We take holidays just to prove we took them.

To be seen as someone with good taste online, you must be easy for others to read. Once that desire takes over, you start acting out taste instead of building it. You care more about applause than actual appreciation.

These internet tribes are just small enough to feel special, but big enough to be noticed. To have taste in these clubs simply means obeying the rules of the group. It is not personal style. It is just an illusion.

What happened to loving art for the sake of it?

Writer Fran Lebowitz often talks about how ballet critics used to get into furious fistfights over the bend of a dancer’s finger. Audiences had sharp taste because they actually cared about the craft. What their ticket said about their social standing did not matter. Today, people claim to love jazz but cannot name a single Duke Ellington tune. Lebowitz notes that good taste requires good art, and good art requires an audience that truly knows its stuff.

That deep appreciation is dying. We no longer enjoy art simply for the fun of it. Instead, we use culture as a tool to network. We read books to appear clever. We listen to obscure bands to target a specific social group.

Enter the performative man. He uses wired headphones to prove he listens to indie music. He listens to indie music to prove he is gentle. Whether he actually enjoys the songs is irrelevant. He scores social points for the look.    

Good taste requires good art, and good art requires an audience that truly knows its stuff.

When we treat clothes and media as our entire identity, we become terrified of making a mistake. To stay safe, we buy cookie-cutter outfits from “how-to” guides.

In a world where everyone wants to be the DJ, we forget what DJs actually do. A good DJ fades into the background so people can dance. In the past, real tastemakers pushed artists to be better through tough critique. Today, tastemakers are just costumes that we try on for the weekend.

Why should we start making terrible choices again?

The internet can feel like a trap. With artificial intelligence churning out endless, boring copies of human ideas, the online world feels dead. Bots talk to bots, and humans copy the bots. But we do not have to live inside these walled gardens.

Despite all its faults, the internet still offers incredible freedom. You can dig through archives of obscure international bands or watch rare independent films whenever you like. The promise is still there.

To fix our culture, we must drop the idea of “good taste.”

In the past, we built taste through trial and error. We took risks. We wore terrible outfits, bought bad albums, and suffered the embarrassment. By sitting with our mistakes, we worked out what actually suited us. We reached good taste by making a long series of horrendous choices.

The Algorithm is just a paved road across a wild, bumpy landscape. You do not have to stay on the path. You can step off into hidden websites, personal blogs, and quiet forums that ignore the trends.

Try taking an “internet walk.” Click aimlessly from link to link without a goal, just like we did when Wikipedia was new. Let yourself get lost.

We reached good taste by making a long series of horrendous choices.

The idea of wandering is older than the web. In 1958, French thinker Guy Debord suggested the dérive: an unplanned drift through a city. He told people to ignore their usual routines. Follow a random colour down the street. Turn left simply because you rolled a six on a dice. Walk just to walk.

Debord wanted to cure a society that cared more about appearing than being. Today, our culture is obsessed with being “mindful” and “curated.” Every movie is calculated. But if we stop thinking about what a shirt signals to the world and just focus on how it feels to wear, we break the Algorithm’s spell. Clothes and songs stop being social badges. They return to simply being things we enjoy.

Yes, you will make mistakes. You will have moments of truly terrible taste. But style is personal. Unpopular opinions should exist. If some people love expensive designer coats, others should love basic trainers and skinny jeans. Our obsession with fitting into online clubs has killed all our fun and whimsy. Isn’t an occasional embarrassing outfit worth the trade-off?

These days, I’m trying to stop judging shops by their industrial-concrete aesthetic. I realised that many famous, beautiful, hyper-curated cafes serve terrible, sweet coffee. Most days, I prefer a hot cup of kapeng barako.

I know that opinion might lose me points with the creative crowd, but who is a better judge of my own tongue than me? I have drunk enough random cups to earn my opinion.

Treat your style the same way. Forget the expensive coffee. Ignore the barber’s perfect social media feed. Give strange bands a chance. Watch a classic film because it moves you, not because a famous director told you to. Do not just take my word for it. Go out and make some mistakes of your own. ⯃