Hiroshi Fujiwara wears black. Every day. For decades. He's the godfather of streetwear. Supreme, Stüssy, and the reason sneakers cost what they do.
He doesn't dress to impress. He dresses like someone who stopped thinking about it.
An intuitive, almost tuned-in feeling? That's taste.
Rick Rubin sits in a room and tells people what to cut. That's his job. He doesn't play instruments. Doesn't engineer.
Just listens and says "no" to everything that doesn't need to be there. That's_ taste._
Everyone's suddenly obsessed with taste now. "Build it. Develop it. In the AI era, it's your only edge." Fine. But what does that actually mean? Consume more? Scroll? Hoard references?
Taste isn't accumulated. It's internalized.
There's a gap between watching every Wes Anderson film and understanding why the symmetry works. One's a viewer. One has taste.
People with the best taste are usually the least confident.
They see all the ways things could break. Meanwhile, someone with shit taste barrels forward because they can't see what they're missing. Confidence ≠ competence.
Virgil Abloh called it the "3% approach." Take something, change 3%, it's yours. Taste knows which 3% to keep.
The ability to recognize something before everyone else does, and to see it clearly rather than simply valuing its rarity, is taste.
You ever notice, creative decision changes the moment you ask someone else's opinion?
HOT TAKE: Your taste might not be yours. Strip away the likes, comments, group chat. Would you still choose the same thing?
Tremaine Emory, founder of Denim Tears, says streetwear died the moment it stopped being personal. It became about what everyone agreed was cool instead of what you _thought _was cool.
The culture was outsiders with specific points of view. Then consensus took over. Then it got boring.
Taste is also knowing when to have bad taste.
People with resources often have worse taste than people broke. The best restaurants aren't always Michelin-starred. Taste dies in unlimited freedom.
Constraints force specificity.
Taco Bell's brand is perfect. Is it "good taste" by traditional standards? No. It's specific. Specific beats polished. Hot Cheetos are aggressive, on purpose. That self-awareness is taste.
It compels. Doesn't correct.
You build taste by making things and being wrong. Putting something out there. Realizing it doesn't land.
Captions are auto generated
In that wrongness is where taste forms.
Oki-ni (that late-2000s UK fashion site) wasn't trying to have taste. A bunch of people obsessing over Japanese brands no one knew about. They got it wrong half the time. The half they got right became the blueprint.
Your taste is accumulated failures, not references.

How you really know you’ve got taste? You stop asking other people if it's good.
That's the endgame.
Not being able to explain your taste in a Medium post. Rather, being so sure of it that explanation becomes irrelevant.
So how do you actually build it?
We’re not doing that here.
This question deserves its own edition.
What you just read? That's the intellectual version. The "taste as a creative superpower" take. The one everyone's comfortable nodding along to.
Somewhere along the way, we boxed taste to people picking creative work.
It's the phone in your pocket. The reason you went with that case. Why you said yes to Under Armour but not Puma. How B2B feels corporate and D2C feels... friendlier. How some categories just feel premium, and others feel like they're trying too hard.
Taste built all of that.
Not yours. Not ours. Everyone's, collectively, without realizing it.
So next week, we're going full dissection mode. The hierarchies you never voted for. The way exposure quietly outruns effort. Stereotypes that are really just taste gone stale.
The stuff you don't think about because it's so embedded, it feels like breathing.
Next part is how it actually works. On you. Around you
And who knows, by the time we're done, even the way we write might shift. That'd be taste too.
_See you next week. 🥝 _