what we talk about when we talk about taste

on interiority

Y’s 2000 catalogue, Max Vadukul

I’m doing this new thing where I get you guys to anonymously submit relationship stories to me and I post them on Sundays for paid subscribers! This week’s theme is “The last time you fell in love.” If you have a minute, you can answer six quick questions here. Here’s last week’s post about friendship breakups if you’re curious.

I keep thinking about this line from a profile of Miucci Prada: “The first time I saw one of her runway shows, a few years ago, a friend whispered, “What an incredible interior life that woman must have.” I’ve been reading obsessively about various designers I admire lately, and I feel continually struck by the way an ethos takes shape in the clothes. Look at this description of Yohji Yamamoto’s Y’s: “The underlying premise to Y’s was simple: dress women in men’s clothing. In this way, Yamamoto was able to articulate a shift of focus from overt sexuality to an obscured, more mysterious view of women.”

That’s my big learning of the year: understanding the way someone’s interior life translates to what they make. When I first started writing this Substack, I was possessed by the sense that I had to figure out “how to do it.” Which other Substacks do I like, which other Substacks are popular, what do they write about, how do they make it work. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to realize that what I choose to write about is a pure expression of both who I am and what I naturally fixate on. Another way of saying it: interiority is not formulaic. You can look to other people for inspiration, but they can’t tell you what is true for you.

It’s similar to how you can dress “well” by following a formula, but the people whose personal style I am arrested by know what feels true to them. How they dress is an expression of where their attention falls. In other words, they can spell “pharaoh.”

When I see someone panicking about taste, I see someone who knows how to watch a Youtube instructional video but doesn’t know how to look around at the world. They can pay attention to a textbook but not to the dog park. They can’t look at one thing and see it echo in something else. I always come back to this line from I Love Dick: “Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves. Associatively, they’re hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library.” Everything connecting to everything else might be a symptom of psychosis, but it’s also how the magic happens.

Celine showed me this Sheila Heti essay about shopping like an artist: “Whenever something costs a lot, it’s because everyone wants it. The reason you want it is because everyone wants it. And you want it because it costs a lot—you want it more because it costs a lot—because its costing a lot is a sign that it is wanted by many people. The fact that you can afford it and others cannot makes you feel like you are part of an elite circle that not only wants it (like everyone does) but can afford it (like only some).

To turn yourself into an artist, stop buying things that cost a lot. Buy the things that other people don’t want—that only you want, because it’s the right shade of green.”

You can only want something no one wants if you see something that nobody else sees. This is, in a way, weirdly reminds me of the Silicon Valley maxim that all the values lies in working on “low-status” things.

Rachel Cusk on writing her first novel at 22: “I did something perhaps odd for a person of the age I was then, which was twenty-two or twenty-three. I effectively turned away from everybody in my world and from the things everybody else was doing. I walked away into isolation. I didn’t know quite why I wanted to do that, but it was what I felt compelled to do.”

To do the thing that no one else can do, you have to make the choice that no one else would make. But it can’t be performative—you can’t fake it by choosing an unpopular thing, because if you do it arbitrarily, the choice you’re making will just be bad. It actually has to come from something real inside you, the place of knowing beyond language.

When people talk about taste and how to acquire it, I often feel like they’re groping for a shortcut to access their own interiority. Most people think about desirability in terms of what other people are doing—like, this is the hottest coat of the season. This artist has blown up and now they’re too mainstream. I need a Birkin because Hermes makes them difficult to purchase. I keep seeing brands sell things by aping Caroline Bessette-Kennedy’s style, her “aesthetic,” when she herself was a perfectionist who bought relatively few clothes. Self-possession sells, but you can’t buy it.

Of course, it’s natural and perhaps even healthy to discover what we like through mimicry. But perhaps it’s unhealthy to never grow out of it—to never develop your own sense of goodness. I saw some Tweet about how men often index on how attractive other men find their partner—the fact that they’re desired by other people confirms their desirability in your own eyes. Which feels very Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection to me—you need the person you’re dating to be hot because it confirms that you are valuable.

To have an inherent sense of your worthiness that does not need to be confirmed by the market makes you unusual, and potentially delusional. Artists are inherently vulnerable because they pay attention to things other people don’t, the things that you are explicitly told you shouldn’t, because they are impractical and lead to little or no material gain.

Platforms like Substack and industries like publishing are systems that commodify the best of a specific person’s interiority. Which I guess is just how the world works: I spend a lot of time thinking about writing, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about ways I can make a living off of my work. It seems to me that the creatives who tend to “make it” tend to be the people who have an obsessive interest in distribution as well as in the art itself. 

I keep sending people the cerulean sweater monologue as evidence of how one person’s sensibility can infect the entire world. By the time we’re consuming it in the form of, say, a sweater from H&M, we’re already so far from the source. While we’re necessarily influenced by other people’s sensibilities, I feel the most alive lately when I’m looking inwards.

Comme des Garcons Spring 2003