Good taste has never been more accessible.
For centuries, taste functioned as a form of cultural capital. It was shaped by education, geography, social circles and, perhaps most importantly, time. Discovering a painter, a chair, a record or a filmmaker often required curiosity and persistence. Aesthetic preferences developed slowly, accumulating through experiences that could not easily be replicated. Taste was imperfect, deeply personal and, more often than not, slightly irrational.
Today, good taste has become remarkably efficient.
Open any social platform and within minutes an algorithm will introduce you to beautifully designed homes, independent cafés, Scandinavian furniture, Japanese stationery, obscure jazz records and emerging fashion labels. The internet has dismantled many of the barriers that once separated niche culture from mainstream visibility. In many respects, this is an extraordinary achievement. Access to beauty has never been more democratic.
Yet democratisation often carries an unexpected consequence: standardisation.
Spend enough time browsing carefully curated feeds and certain visual languages begin to repeat themselves with surprising consistency. Apartments across different continents share the same muted colour palettes. Coffee shops resemble minimalist galleries. Book covers echo one another. Fashion collections borrow identical silhouettes, while interiors quietly converge towards the same combination of natural wood, brushed steel and linen textiles. Everything appears tasteful. Increasingly, everything also appears interchangeable.
This is not because people have become less creative. On the contrary, more individuals are engaging with design, architecture, photography and fashion than at any other point in history. The paradox lies elsewhere. We no longer discover aesthetics independently; we inherit them collectively. Algorithms reward familiarity, and familiarity gradually transforms into consensus. Eventually, the safest way to appear original is to resemble everyone else who also wishes to appear original.
Perhaps this explains why genuinely unusual spaces now feel almost unsettling. A living room filled with inherited furniture, mismatched objects collected over decades and books stacked without concern for visual harmony can seem strangely radical against a backdrop of perfectly balanced interiors. Imperfection has become unexpected because optimisation has become the default.
The same phenomenon extends well beyond our homes. Restaurants, hotels, magazines and retail spaces increasingly speak the same visual language, not because they share an ideology but because they share reference points. Inspiration, once gathered from travel, conversation or accident, now circulates through the same digital ecosystems. The result is a world in which good taste spreads faster than individuality.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with beauty. Nor is there anything wrong with admiring thoughtful design or carefully composed spaces. The problem emerges when aesthetics cease to express personality and begin instead to signal cultural competence. Taste quietly shifts from curiosity towards performance. We stop asking what moves us and start asking what belongs on the mood board.
Perhaps this is the quiet irony of our age. Never before have so many people possessed such refined visual literacy, and never before has it been so difficult to surprise one another. We have learned how to recognise good taste almost instantly, but in doing so we may have forgotten how to cultivate something far rarer: an aesthetic language that feels unmistakably our own.
Real taste has never been about choosing the right objects. It has always been about revealing the person who chose them.