Fashion tells you what everyone is wearing this season. Taste tells you what you will still be glad of in twenty years.
Fashion and taste are spoken of as though they were the same thing. They are not. In several respects they are opposites, and a good deal of confusion — and some expensive mistakes — follows from treating them as one.
Fashion is collective and provisional. It records what a great many people find desirable at a given moment, and it changes deliberately, so that last year’s desire becomes this year’s faint embarrassment. There is nothing wrong with that. Fashion is a lively, inventive and often brilliant conversation, and following it can be a real pleasure.
Taste is something else. It is individual and slow: a person’s settled judgement about what is good — in clothes, rooms, books, food, conversation — formed over years of looking, comparing and choosing.
How it is formed
Taste is not inherited, whatever the old phrases about breeding may imply. It is learned, and it is learned in one way only: through attention. One looks at a great many things, notices which continue to satisfy, and slowly understands why.
The education includes mistakes. Everyone with taste has bought the wrong coat, admired the wrong chair, followed a fashion that aged badly in the photographs. The mistakes are the syllabus. They teach the difference between the pleasure of novelty and the pleasure of quality, which feel identical for about a fortnight.
“Fashion asks whether a thing is new. Taste asks whether it is good. The second question is harder, and far more interesting.”
The test of years
The plainest test of taste is durability: whether the object, the room, the garment still satisfies after years of use; whether it improves with wear or merely survives it; whether it is still noticed with pleasure or has quietly become furniture.
Things chosen with taste tend to pass. They are rarely the most striking objects in the room. Often they are the ones that went unremarked at first, and then could not be forgotten.
Without the sneer
Taste has an unfortunate association with exclusion, and the two deserve separating. Snobbery uses taste as a ranking instrument. Real taste has no interest in ranking anyone; it is too occupied with enjoying things. A person of genuine taste is usually generous about the choices of others, understanding that taste can be built around quite different values, and that a room wholly unlike one’s own may be entirely right for its owner.
What it gives back
The reward of taste is not admiration. It is a life among things one genuinely likes, chosen for reasons one understands. Fashion will keep changing, and it is pleasant to watch it go by. Taste, once formed, is what keeps one steady while it does.
