The Business of Taste
Why discernment is the final proof of humanity in a quantified world
The Business of Taste
Taste is not a luxury. It is a survival skill. This essay explores how human intuition, conviction, and restraint have become the last true differentiators in an age ruled by metrics. It argues that taste is the soul’s filter for truth and the new foundation of creative and economic power.
The Taste Paradox
We measure everything now. Engagement rates, conversion funnels, attention spans clocked in milliseconds. Yet the room still goes quiet when someone with taste walks in.
Not because they said anything. Because they are something.
In a world obsessed with data, the people who move culture still do so by instinct. Beauty was dismissed as frivolous until it became the only signal that cut through algorithmic noise. Now it is strategy. Now it is survival.
Taste wins because it speaks to the part of us that refuses to be optimized. It is the soul’s bullshit detector. And in an economy built on simulation, authenticity reads like power.
The shift from aesthetic luxury to strategic necessity was sealed when Apple turned design into a business religion. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive built the most valuable company on earth by prioritizing intuitive, taste-driven design over focus-group consensus. The market rewarded them for clarity and restraint.
According to the Design Management Institute, design-led companies on the S&P 500 consistently outperform the index by wide margins. Aesthetic integrity now has a measurable return.
The irony is that taste’s new prestige has made it performative. Balenciaga’s hyper-expensive anti-fashion, shoes that look worn, bags that look trash, proved that even rebellion can become a brand cliché. In the modern market, even the rejection of taste is just another taste system. Authenticity, coherence, and conviction are now measurable assets.
Taste as Currency
Taste functions like gravity. It does not announce itself. It just pulls.
Things orbit those who have it - opportunities, collaborations, trust. Taste is not elitist, it is accurate. It is the ability to sense what is real before consensus approves it. When someone says no while everyone else says yes, that is not contrarianism. That is calibration.
Discernment has become the rarest form of capital. In a world of infinite supply, curation is the new creation.
A24 has built an entire studio on this principle. Its films are not linked by genre but by emotional texture. Their curation is the brand, and their logo is a guarantee of taste. Viewers trust A24 as a creative filter, a shortcut to quality.
Virgil Abloh used the same principle in fashion, translating the codes of street culture into the language of luxury. His precision was not in making things but in knowing which references to elevate. That discernment became Off-White’s gravity.
By contrast, Meta’s rebrand fell flat because it was over-optimized and taste-blind. It lacked conviction. The same goes for the early NFT boom, technically sound but culturally hollow. You cannot fake taste, the market senses it instantly.
The economy of attention has shifted into the economy of discernment. Effort does not win anymore. Accuracy does.
The Supply Chain of Taste
Taste is fragile. It travels like a signal, strong at the source but easily distorted in transmission.
The brands that protect it treat taste as governance, not garnish. Patagonia built a culture around its founder’s ethos, durability, restraint, and moral clarity. Its famous “Don’t buy this jacket” campaign was not advertising, it was taste institutionalized.
LVMH applies the same principle at scale. Each house has a creative director who acts as a steward of taste, not a marketer. The job is not replication, it is fidelity. The spirit must survive translation.
When this chain breaks, the results are immediate. Gap’s 2010 logo redesign and Tropicana’s packaging overhaul both collapsed within weeks. The data said they were improvements. The audience said they were lies. Taste guards emotional memory, and memory is brand equity.
You can document process, but you cannot document instinct. The best systems do not codify taste, they protect the conditions for it to thrive.
When Taste Scales (and When It Breaks)
Enter the vibe meeting.
Twelve people, one mood board, zero conviction. AI trend reports written by algorithms predicting next year’s emotions.
This is where it turns absurd. Corporations try to industrialize what is inherently human. They hire taste committees. They A/B test intuition. They workshop soul. And then they wonder why everything looks the same.
Aesthetic inflation is real, brands overproduce beauty until it loses meaning. Every streaming service has the same sans-serif logo. Every luxury streetwear brand sells the same rebellion. Consensus is the opposite of conviction.
Walter Benjamin called it the loss of aura, when art becomes reproducible, its spirit dies. Susan Sontag warned that over-interpretation flattens meaning. Taste suffers the same fate when reduced to a strategy deck.
Scaling taste requires principles, not templates. Governance, not groupthink. The goal is not to amplify the original vision but to protect it from decay.
The ROI of Resonance
Taste creates emotional equity that no ad spend can buy. Resonance is retention. Beauty is credibility.
The Nike Kaepernick campaign proved that aesthetic conviction outperforms consensus. The stark black and white imagery and simple copy, “Believe in something,” was taste aligned with belief. It cost them short-term sales and earned them long-term trust.
Hermès achieves the same effect through restraint. The brand markets mystique instead of product. It treats scarcity and silence as strategy. Recognition without repetition has become its market moat.
Even Glossier’s decline offers proof. Its taste-driven aesthetic pulled an audience faster than its systems could sustain. Taste creates gravity, but systems keep orbit. Without both, brands burn out.
Cultural compounding, the accumulated trust of consistent conviction, is the true ROI of taste. People remember how something made them feel, and they return to that frequency.
The Economics of Soul
Taste is how the soul speaks in the language of commerce. Not anti-capitalist, post-capitalist. It is human meaning expressed through systems once optimized for efficiency but now desperate for resonance.
Byung-Chul Han calls it the exhaustion of optimization. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism. Both describe the same crisis, the system has maximized output and minimized feeling. Taste becomes rebellion, a reassertion of care in a culture that automates everything.
Rick Rubin frames it simply, creation as spiritual practice. The best brands are beginning to sound more like Rubin than Wall Street. Aesop, Maison Margiela, Hermès, they all sell calm conviction. They sell proof that someone still gives a damn.
The future of business belongs to those who treat taste not as style but as stewardship. When efficiency is infinite, meaning becomes the only scarce resource.
The businesses that win will not be the loudest. They will be the clearest. The ones that sound most like themselves.
Taste is not the luxury. Taste is the last proof that someone was here, that they saw something worth making, and they made it true.
