If you're on social media, you know you're never safe from a trend. One week, it's "kinda chic to…"; the next, it's something new.
Distinct words regularly infiltrate the cultural lexicon, such as the aforementioned "chic", and others like "authentic", "niche", or "demure". They become cultural signals in a specific period of time, repeated until they're commercially useful, then repeated some more until they lose their foundational meaning.
This process of trend-setting used to happen at a much slower rate, within selective communities. Today, technology has cleared the path to a more fluid collective structure, accelerating and commodifying the way tastes develop and inform culture.
Trends like these have become synonymous with consumerism, marketing makes sure of that. Brands irrevocably altered our relationship with words, influencing meaning-making and how we communicate with one another. It follows that the larger the scale of impact, the bigger the influence on culture.
This is how taste finds itself in danger of becoming the next "chic", a buzzword to hop on instead of something to acquire. The problem, however, is that taste in and of itself is incompatible with trend culture. It is something cultivated over time, built through curiosity for the world and deciphering what parts of it make up your own inner world.
"Following the stream" is exactly where taste goes to die.
Technology grants access, but it cannot replace your discernment. It's what separates you from AI technology. An algorithm can scour the internet, surface what's popular and hand over a predictive analysis. What it can't do is form a real, subjective understanding of what it observed — that falls squarely in the human realm.
Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste was shaped by access: what we're taught to value, what we've had time and means to encounter. Much of that has since collapsed.
What Bourdieu called "low culture" now actively directs culture: luxury fashion borrows from street, ordinary people act as influencers, stepping into the role once reserved for royalty, deciding what is in and what is not, and references once gate-kept now circulate to anyone willing to scroll.
If everyone has equal access to the same references and algorithms dictate homogeneity of interests, taste turns into a blanketed term functioning in cultural fluidity. It stops meaning discernment and simply becomes another word for exposure.
Editorial judgement is this understanding in practice — deciding what deserves attention, what's worth saying, what's worth sharing. Trends move at a speed that overwhelms and chasing them for the sake of it reads as exactly what it is to an audience: inauthentic.
Developing your own perspective, your own voice, is not a personality trait. Following the stream might be where taste goes to die, but knowing when not to follow it is what makes taste an editorial skill.
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*Image courtesy of Canva
**Information sourced from Thred and CEC Online.