Having Taste

An ode but also an inquiry

Hello all! A special piece I wrote freelance will be coming out in the next week that I will send out with Small Joints so you don’t miss it... and for the first two weeks of October I will be writing to you from Greece. (I made a pact with myself in July where if I didn’t find an apartment for August I would go to Rome for a month, and if I did find an apartment, I would go to Greece in October… It’s all about sacrifice.)

I’ve been thinking so much about this topic, and I’m sure this is not the first you’ll read about it from me. Read about my background in Estate Sales, flipping through House & Gardens from the eighties, and second-hand grief for the way we stamp taste out.

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Diana Vreeland in House & Garden, May 1988

I always say some of my closest friends seem out of this time, like they belong to a different era. It can feel like we are all ragtag orphans who have found each other across time and space, somehow. Even if we’ve met and are not yet that close, our interest is piqued because we both recognize something in each other and tip our hats. It may be an aesthetic sensibility, intellectual flair, a gregarious joie de vivre… all of it in service of having a very developed personal taste, and recognizing it in others who do, too.

There’s something about this moment where everyone wants to seem interesting. I gawked when I saw someone talk about how they were going to practice using a kindle because the urge to be seen reading a certain book in public felt too performative. WHAT are you people talking about? Why not read in bed propped by seven pillows or in a chair at home? The only person you should be worried about witnessing your life is yourself. Markers of taste do not make taste. Seeming interesting does not make you interesting… Why this needs to be said is beyond me. Whenever I see these kinds of conversations happening I feel so removed from this current moment. I see my friends struggling to find where they fit, too.

Like personal style, I just don’t know if everyone can have taste. Those that do, have already prioritized several factors over regular life. Maybe it’s never too late to start but those that I know who have IT began their practice as children. It makes all the difference. Much like a singing voice, I think these kinds of people are rare. I don’t think we all need to become pop stars, much less ballerinas, but I do think that when you see someone that is special like this, you should wonder how they’re being protected. The world makes it harder for these kinds of people to exist. Instead of trying desperately to become someone like this, you should ask how you can celebrate those that already are.

This entire inquiry came to an emotional head when I picked up my latest acquisition from an estate sale, a Milo Baughman chair. I left feeling bereft. There is always something sad about going to an estate sale. I’ve been to a number of them, and when I worked in re-sale I would often go to a house and hand-pick the clothes of someone who had recently died. There were the Prada suits that filled a white van to the roof, all tailored to fit an older man’s small frame of five-foot-five (almost impossible to sell), there was a British woman who had a taxidermied bear in her stairwell, who only wore kitschy dresses by Italian designers. The houses were usually beautifully decorated in that person’s particular style, but when you looked closer there would be signs of disrepair and age. Mobility ramps installed, old wheelchairs, handles in the bath. You could see how the person tried to stay in their house as long as they could.

Being surrounded by a stranger’s belongings and seeing how they organized their world with such detail often moves me. It also gives me second-hand grief. It feels too intimate to be privy to—who am I to be thumbing through their life in clothes?

When I went to pick up the chair, I knew the apartment was going to be beautiful. My best friend had sent me the auction listing, “This woman knew about colour.” I didn’t expect to be let in, but I nudged the estate people so I could take a peek. The woman with a clipboard said in a low voice, "You know, she only ever used the oven once... for hors d'oeuvres." I asked if she knew what the woman did and she replied, “I’m not sure, but she definitely entertained.”

House & Garden, November 1984

You recognize taste when you step into someone’s world and it feels like you’ve been transported. You may never know that person’s interior life but you see hints of it everywhere. The effort the person has made to surround themselves with things that they love, they really love, and find beautiful is so clear. The effect on the visitor should not be to replicate their exact sensibilities but for you to develop your own more deeply. Some may argue that I am pushing for consumption but taste is so obviously not only made up of objects. It comes from a reverence and curiosity for history, art, craftsmanship, literature, music, film! All that eventually filters through to the objects one surrounds yourself with if you care enough. People with taste are noticeable savants—experts at what they love.

Now, this woman’s apartment was so meticulous tailored to her—with walls painted raspberry and robin’s egg blue, with black and white checkered floors, zebra print and paintings of leopards in her bedroom, and hand-painted murals in the foyer. I was of two minds: I wanted to live a life like hers, be with someone who would let me, but then also… what would happen to this place now? All that life and talent and obvious flair would be knocked down and renovated to become some beige monstrosity and the apartment put on the market for I’m sure, more than a million dollars.

Scenes from the aforementioned estate sale that broke me

I’ve been flipping through my collection of old House & Gardens that I “borrowed” from my grandmother. She also has stacks and stacks of old Architectural Digests going all the way back to the seventies. I turn to them when I’m feeling blue about the state of magazine publishing or feeling blah about my apartment. I don’t dare imagine what all these houses look like now, or if they even still exist. People often say that my work is nostalgic, as though I yearn for the past. I’m not nostalgic for the way things once were, but I am sad about what we choose to leave behind and forget.

Whenever I am struck by someone’s taste, I love seeing how little influence our current moment has on them. As though this person’s world lives in a vacuum that without them couldn’t exist and it was never done for anyone but themselves. They brought all of this forward to their present, everyday life—this random year of twenty-twenty-four—pieces found in far flung places and perhaps kept for idiosyncratic reasons, and this is what it looks like all together. It’s a testament to what we need to preserve.

The asinine conversations about what people signal by way of what they read or how they dress is really the death of what is beautiful about taste. The importance placed on symbols as a shortcut into creating an identity without any real lived experience, in fact, sells everyone short. Just because you can paint by numbers does not mean you’re an artist. Once we come to terms with this, all that striving can stop, and people can find out what they really love even when no one’s looking.