Fashion, Algorithms, and the Death of Taste - Sol Thompson
Fashion, Algorithms, and the Death of Taste
With Instagram and TikTok's algorithms permanently warping the way we approach fashion, does "taste" exist online? Is the Great Normalization of taste warping what we consider to be "good"?
8 Replies
This article was alright! I feel like people who are perpetuating this form of uniform dressing are choosing to approach fashion on their own terms, and sometimes it's reflective of a less nerdy approach to it than what people into fashion are usually used to. It's an effective, if simplistic base that makes for great social capital at the moment. Let em have it
everyone who writes a death of taste article should be put into a woodchipper
I liked it
The author will be missed after the woodchipper does its thing
At times these pieces do feel like "I don't like trends they're yucky and boring" but who am I to complain about a call to action for people to get interested in things
I liked it. I particularly liked this line "Want to have a “personal style”? Get offline." :xd:
I think dressing in this somewhat formulaic fashion certainly has its advantages. When following a formula you drastically limit the amount of choices you make and can focus more on execution. Which is why I lately have kinda started to formulate my own personal dress formula, which I find quite helpful to not agonize about dressing too much.
I found this quite interesting becose it reminded me of ye-olden days, when I still followed :derek: on twitter and twitter and :derek: were still somewhat relevant: He kept harping on how ppl in The Good Old Days were dressing better because they had coherent dress-codes to follow, which in a similar way to algorythm-curated-dress-formulas narrow stuff down and present a coherent whole to copy. I just think its interesting that a very similar phenomenon (albeit with less formal enforcement) has re-emerged eventually.
While the author treats this purely as a Bad Thing, I think it speaks to a larger need by a more superficially fashion interested crowd to be presented with a dresscode to follow. Which is not neccessarily a bad thing, not everyone who owns a car wants to be a car mechanic and tune their own car after all.
Personally this is even a gripe I have with the discord: Usually the answer to "How do you find your personal style" is "look at even more inspo" even here. And I personally have found this deeply unhelpful, because eventually you are so flooded with different ideas that it gets hard to tell whats what and which inspo I actually liked.
I think sometimes the best thing is to touch grass and ponder what you actually like while being immersed in the real world. At least for me that has so far proven to be much more productive than flooding myself with inspo.
