Style is often treated like a personality trait: you either “have it” or you don’t. Like freckles. Or charisma. The problem is that this idea collapses the second you try to define it. If style were purely instinctive, then no one would learn it, teach it, refine it, or lose it… right?
It usually starts with a sentence like “Style is subjective”. Then everyone goes home, orders what they want, and pretends the question is solved. Except, it really isn’t, because if it were purely personal, then Harry Winston would be on equal footing with your cousin’s pasta necklace, and Chanel would be just another woman who had fun with scissors. Which, let’s be honest, feels incorrect.
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Most papers I read on the subject put it quite simply: they argue that good taste and style actually do exist, not as a universal law but as a partial order. Not perfect, not fixed, but not random either. Like vaccines, style works on humans. And since humans share a lot in common, namely eyes, emotions, boredom thresholds, some things work better than others.
What is good style?
And this is where things get a tad uncomfortable. Because admitting that good taste exists also means admitting that bad taste exists. Which explains why the concept keeps getting declared dead every few decades, usually right after social media democratizes something. When magazines lost their monopoly on “what looks right”, TikTok and Instagram took over. Chiara Ferragni went from blogger to ambassador for houses that once dressed only discreet heiresses. The power shifted from editors to feeds, from salons to algorithms. Taste became fast, viral, and suspiciously unanimous.
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Which is inconvenient, because style likes to pretend it is rebellion. We talk about “personal style” as if it were a private island, untouched by culture, class, or Instagram. In reality, style is historical. Ancient Greece had ratios. The 20th century had magazines. And the 21st century has algorithms. What changed is not the existence of standards, but what controls them.
Just a matter of taste
Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of style holds: aesthetics are never neutral. They separate, signal, and sort. Chanel and Schiaparelli didn’t just disagree on silhouettes; they embodied two different biographies and stitched them into their couture. One built on scarcity, the other on excess. Their “styles” were legible because they were coherent.
So, is there really such a thing as good style? Yes, but not in the moral, universal sense people fear. Good taste is not consensus, but coherence. It’s when things answer their content instead of screaming for attention. Hiking boots at a wedding: no. Hiking boots at a barn dinner: suddenly poetic. What is new is the pressure to perform style publicly. Platforms turned into content: what to wear, eat, own, desire. The risk is not diversity, but standardization. When “good style” becomes a checklist, it stops being style and becomes decor. Once upon a time, style had editors. Now it has engagements.
