🟧 Is "character" the new taste?
Chasing taste online might be a dead end.
This week we have a provocative essay from friends of One Thing on the banality of “good taste” content, plus 🟧 I Ching paintings 🟧 Shinjuku ads 🟧 influencer novels…
Things of the week
Keith McNally’s gadabout son is opening his own NYC French restaurant.
Beautiful abstract paintings and installations drawn from the I Ching.
Flying ultra first class means you never have to interact with another human being. Total privacy (aka isolation) is the new luxury!
Great literary nonfiction essay from n+1: Finding the Cattle Queen. Stick with it all the way through.
Tokyo’s duct-tape typographer subway employee helped to design an extremely stylish ad in Shinjuku Station for a new Nike store.
What is the “influencer novel”? (Acute criticism, but a genre we do not want to read.)
Acquired Taste
by Clara Malley
Brands are chasing a sense of good taste online, but that leads to a dead end if there’s nothing else behind it. Is “character” the new taste? (Excerpted from Side Projects.)
If for every year in Brand World you received a new buzzword badge for your Brownie sash — a “community” badge in 2023-2024, a “worldbuilding” badge in 2023-2022, a “purpose” badge for 2021-2020 — the 2025-2026 badge is “taste.” Some of the same brands once clamoring to prove their digital literacy via TikTok and brainrot are now eager to communicate their taste via Jacquemus- style “filmic” video.
Perhaps this desire for prestige social was brought about by the realization that social-native (memes, lo-fi everything) is ugly, or by the rise of slop and the diminishing returns of competing with bots to be the most unhinged, or because it’s counterproductive for brands to latch their kisser onto the human centipede of brand accounts commenting under a viral video (it is).
I’m pro-“brands looking to have a creative opinion again,” especially compared to the alternative in which even organic advertising — as opposed to only the paid, hyper-targeted, terrifying stuff — mirrors slop. I also agree with the popular thinkpiece thesis that pursuing taste and elevating expertise is an important bulwark against AI and human-engineered content that’s generated to engage eyeballs and not enrich life. But when the pursuit of taste is diminished to the pursuit of “better” content, it stops being a defense against the worst effects of algorithmic recommendations and can instead be another kind of entrapment.
It’s easy to harp on social media for propagating “bad” taste; that could, to you, mean basic West Village girlie-pop; bland and beige interiors; meathead grindset DIL videos, etc. But algorithms throw seeds of good taste into the wind as well. These Jacquemus-type videos are the social marketing equivalent of Scandinavian furniture; of a big and healthy monstera plant; of the tasteful yet pervasive; and hollow, sophistication that Vincenzo Latronico describes in his novel Perfection. The repetitiveness of this “good taste” content on social is striking. All roads lead to a carousel post of the Fallen Angels tunnel scene. To Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. To Madonna leaving a gym in London (#mood). To 90s Playstation ads. To the Oasis vs. Blur charity match.
These kernels of good taste get melted down to scrap in the algorithm and turned into a mimetic version of “good” taste which has come to shape the slop-free corners of social media. It’s given rise to quote-unquote creative entrepreneur professions like tablescaping. It feeds the churn of viral aesthetics. It’s responsible in part for the proliferation of mood accounts and curator accounts that repost each other and themselves. It’s also a factor in the feeling of hollowness via deja vu that being on social media increasingly inspires. The rise of filmic brand vignettes is a kind of culmination, the entrance of mass consumer brands to the fray signaling here, as always, that the sharp edges of culture — and of tastemaking brands — need to get sharper.
We’re seeing the salient dividing line shift from being about demonstrating good taste via content to proving that you’ve earned your stripes; recent writing about the “death of cool” by Anu Lingala and Charli XCX has a version of this problem at its center. I expect we’ll see a shift in emphasis from taste to character, in which the premium is placed on contradiction over cohesion and the specificity of one’s interests over generalized cultural fluency. I’m thinking: incongruous hobbies (ex. Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men), niche and unprestigious collections (stamps? pennies?), and prickliness toward commercial fluency and palatability. Not driven by a desire to be cool or interesting per se but by a desire to be free of the pasteurized good taste, the style without substance, that the algorithm often encourages.
Brands and creatives must prioritize the idea over the image. The shift toward Substack is an early indication. It’s harder to fake your “taste credentials” in a 1000+ word article than in an IG Carousel. A migration away from short-form platforms toward digital and physical surfaces allows for higher concept, more time-consuming work that extends beyond a single TikTok or a single retail season. And while I don’t believe a mass exodus is in the cards, I do think more rising creatives and brands will decide that the effort to cultivate a social media presence is simply not worth the reward. And rather than waiting to hit 200k followers — or be ripped off by the masses — they will take their creative output far beyond the reaches of Mark Zuckerberg’s limp rhymes-with-stick.
Clara Malley is a senior director at the studio and podcast Side Projects. Order a copy of Side Projects Issue 01 here.
Best of One Thing
Look back through the archives for OT’s greatest hits. We send out weekly bulletins of culture news and original commentary.
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Aggregation theory Big media companies and tiny Substacks alike are competing to offer authoritative viewpoints.
The disappearing Insta grid Why we don’t like posting to Instagram’s main feed anymore.