It’s a common cliché that college inspires personal reinvention, and that eye-rolling platitude must also mean that a new year is a new chance at a fresh persona. This September, you may be the friend who’s come back from Erasmus more worldly, lamenting the Dublin nightlife scene while raving about Berlin or letting a lisp slip while explaining your Barcelona lifestyle last spring. You could be a fourth year, eager to bring out the wardrobe you’ve collected over the years for a final cycle of pubs, balls, and house parties. And you could even be a first year, doe-eyed and perceptive — maybe coming from a rural town or a different country altogether — taking in the new environment and deciding who you might become. Self-actualisation is a Sisyphean task, and one must imagine the Trinity student happy to try.
But on a campus full of eccentrics, your clothes quickly become your character. Personal reinvention becomes a meticulous cultivation, a checklist of literary fiction to read or vintage pop-ups to attend. If you trade AirPods for wired headphones, wear a mismatched skirt over your baggy jeans, and finally shed the Marlboros for loose tobacco and learn how to roll your own, maybe Campus Couture will finally take your photo. Eccentricity — your good taste — is a form of social currency. The better your taste, the cooler you are. After all, you wouldn’t be caught dead in the Arts Block in sweatpants.
But if good taste determines our self-worth and social standing, a definition may be in order. Unfortunately, taste is famously ineffable, and it is most easily described by the characteristics in its proximity. Good taste is thus often conflated with whatever contemporary culture deems cool. In the 2010s, to have good taste meant to have the most beanies, the tightest jeans, and a superior liking for craft beer and indie folk. Now, good taste requires resembling a 2000s era Abercrombie and Fitch model if they had Pinterest and a DJ controller. The style changes, but the sense of trendy sophistication clings.
In Mark Greif’s New York Times essay ‘The Hipster in the Mirror’, he argues that good taste is not just a social currency for cool youth, but also an inevitable hierarchy. Taste is competitive, and whoever has the most elevated taste is the most authentic, the most stylish. Greif draws on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of taste, which he defines as a set of conditioned penchants towards types of art, food, or clothing distinctive and contained to each social class. To Bourdieu, good taste was wealthy taste, and it transforms material class hierarchy into one that is intrinsic and spiritual. The rich person did not just contain a superior level of wealth, but also an innately superior eye. Yet postmodernists have long declared the dissolution between high and low culture, so if good taste is still born from an elitist sensibility, it is now only carrying the vestiges of aristocracy. Thanks to social media, good taste has been further diffused and democratised. It’s no longer relegated to opera halls or glitzy ballrooms out of the common people’s sight. Now, social media is an immediate window into the world of the refined. The biggest economic hurdle to taste now is simply buying a phone.
On any social media algorithm with a fashionable feed, good taste is always taught. Small influencers are the early adopters and arbiters of ‘cool’. Today, they wear their jeans low and have a seemingly never-ending wardrobe of unique vintage designer and impressive thrift finds. They listen to artists that still play small gigs and small clubs, and once those same artists could comfortably sell out a venue like Vicar Street, they swiftly revoke their praise. Some retain their refined individuality by simply staying well-read in a post-literate society, and they post on-the-nose ‘cool girl reading lists’ featuring the detached Didion and the relaxed Babitz bound in sleek covers with minimalist font. According to social media, good taste is didactic and easy to pick up, or at least easy to mimic. If you wear the right clothes and appreciate the right art, you must have good taste. But this is a grave error. In reality, social media has diluted taste to just its visual aesthetics. Books become signifiers of subcultures, and the rise of a pair of jeans is inversely proportional to their owner’s sophistication. Good taste, it now seems, is simply a vacuous product of an indifferent and homogenising algorithm.
Good taste without substance isn’t a good taste at all. Taste should not be a set of conventional preferences belonging once to a social class and now to an algorithm. As Susan Sontag describes in her seminal essay ‘Notes on Camp’, taste is not just ‘subjective preference’ and frivolous aesthetics, but rather something that ‘governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response’. If her definition of taste includes not just visual taste, but also taste in acts, morality, and ideas, then reducing the matter of taste to popular aesthetics is to lack it entirely. As Sontag says, ‘to patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself’.
Pretending to have good taste without the effort of intense contemplation and slow cultivation is a hollow pursuit; It’s a lazy paint job over a deep crack, a religion with no surviving holy text. Good taste is not something you can take off a rack at a thrift store and simply try on. It requires truly knowing yourself rather than performing as a palatable, too-cool version for validation on social media and from your collegiate peers. To have good taste is to sharpen your eye and point it inward. Rather than gazing at what the people around you or online are wearing, reading, or listening to, you should interrogate whether those things are authentic to you. If you find that you really do like the smooth flavour of Amber Leaf, or that there is something entrancing in an eclectic club mix, it should be a discernment entirely your own. Because when you’re alone in your bedroom, stripped of your stylish outfit of the day with the music turned down and your phone shut off, you should recognise what is left of yourself. To have your own taste is to have dignity and pride in what you earnestly love, and that is a style that will never go out of fashion.
