Having individual taste is a lot more interesting and valuable than having “good taste.”
I.
Let me tell you about the guy with the best taste I have ever seen.
His name is Maximiliano (‘Maxi’ for short). He lives in Bariloche, Argentina, just a few minutes’ drive from the place where the Limay River spills out of the Nahuel Huapi lake. He fishes there every morning with a two-handed fly rod. Last year, Maxi entered his 70s and you can tell in the way he walks down to the river; slower, off-kilter. He catches as many fish as ever.
If you opened Maxi’s wardrobe you would see dozens of long-sleeve button-ups: chambray, denim, flannel, cotton. He is a prepared man. On the other side of his closet there are ten kinds of denim jackets and tight-fitting jeans. Maxi doesn’t wear blazers. He doesn’t wear fancy trousers. He wears his jeans and his button-down shirts and his denim jackets.
On the river, Maxi uses a fly rod his father made for him decades ago. It might not shine like the latest and greatest but it casts the way he wants it to. The box where he holds his artificial flies is a rusted-out Altoids tin an American friend brought him years back. He has glued some foam to the inside so he has something to stick the hooks into. It works well enough.
Maxi goes home in the evenings to the house his grandfather built, which he has remodeled a couple of times with his wife. After a long day he finally allows himself to collapse into a beat-up leather chair he can’t remember where he bought. On the walls are a few taxidermied fish from when you could still kill the trout. There’s a poster from a movie he liked in the ‘90s. There are a few paintings done by his friend, who passed away last year.
There are only one or two restaurants in the whole town Maxi considers worth eating at, so most nights he’s at home. Lamb, beef, sometimes chicken, grilled over a wood fire. There’s a winery in Mendoza he likes and whose cheap wine he has been drinking almost exclusively for years. One glass a night in retirement is fine, he thinks. Sometimes two, depending on how the fishing went. He enjoys dinner with his wife at the table he built when he worked as a carpenter.
Oh, and I forgot to mention…
Maxi does not know what an Eames Chair is. He does not think Porsche 911s are very cool (he still owns his Peugeot 504). Last year he saw Past Lives and deeply regretted it; his favorite movie is Top Gun. Maxi does not use a Leica camera. He is completely unfamiliar with the name Dieter Rams. He hates watches. His jeans are not Japanese selvedge denim. He prefers dark roast coffee, drip. He uses a nonstick pan (not cast iron, not carbon steel) because he says it makes it easier for him to cook eggs in the morning. Maxi has never in his life thought about taste, nor described himself as being “high taste.” He barely knows what that even means.
Maxi is just the sort of guy who has spent his whole life pursuing stuff he was interested in, the kind of guy who is not afraid to have opinions that only he believes in, the kind of guy who is completely confident in what he likes and doesn’t care much what others think.
Ironically, Maxi is the polar opposite of most people I meet today who talk about “taste.”
II.
For some reason “taste” and having “high taste” and doing “taste-led work” has become a big deal in certain circles (like tech) for the last few years. (So has agency, i.e. ‘you can just do things’, which has also become a big cultural meme but might have more merit.)
Job descriptions at some companies literally include phrases like ‘we hire people with taste’ or ‘you must have good/high taste’. People on social media and Substack and elsewhere have made taste a part of their brand. Rick Rubin videos are everywhere. Writers and designers and product managers have begun to describe themselves as ‘taste-led’.
But I’m confused. When a startup posts a job looking for ‘high taste’ people, or when a designer describes themselves as being ‘taste-led’... What do they actually mean? Because there seems to be a strong dissonance between what I perceive as taste—in someone like Maxi—and what all of these other people seem to perceive as taste. I know this because if most of these supposedly ‘high taste’ people met Maxi they would come away telling me he has bad taste.
So what is taste, then, to these people? Well, the tech-y version of taste seems to be more like a club; a group of people you can get access to if you think, or pretend to think, like they do. And “having taste” has less to do with individuality and more to do with groupthink: do you have the correct design opinions? Do you like the right products? Do you read the right writing? Do you have the right vibe (that all the other people in the Taste Club approve of)?
When taste works this way, being a person with good taste can be simplified to a series of correct decisions, of correct opinions, that will land you a spot in the Taste Club. You buy the Eames Chair. You say you prefer Software X over Software Y even though they pretty much do the same thing. You redesign your company’s office to look more like a cozy home, you put books on the shelves, you ask people to take their shoes off. You start drinking light roast pourover coffee. You buy some high-quality denim in Japan. You shoot with a Leica. Whatever.
Then, eventually, you are a “high taste” person. You are allowed to add it to your Twitter bio and to your website. You start hiring for people and you can say you’re looking for “high taste.”
But do you actually have taste? Or are you just wearing a very specific kind of costume?
III.
So far we have covered two kinds of taste: Maxi’s version of taste (which could also be described as confident individuality) and the tech startup world’s version of taste (which could also be described as status-oriented groupthink).
It is worth at least mentioning a third kind of taste, which is what Paul Graham writes about in his essay on taste: the ability to identify something objectively good. I think this is what the tech-y version of taste aspires to be but does not succeed at.
The big issue here is I don’t think ‘objectively good taste’ is as useful or interesting as people think. I prefer weird, crazy individuality. I don’t care if something is ‘bad taste’ according to a guy named Fabricio on social media who works at a sexy startup. And if there really is some true list of the best things in every category—the best chairs, the best paintings, the best software, whatever—I don’t want it. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone agrees on it. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is living eerily similar “high taste” lives.
I want to live in a world where Maximiliano wakes up in southern Argentina and puts on his ripped tight jeans and drinks his dark roast drip coffee and drives his Peugeot 504 to the river and fishes every morning with the flies he ties himself. I think if the next time I walked into Maxi’s house I saw an Eames Chair and a Leica on the shelf I’d drop dead.
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