Do You Have Good Taste? It’s More Important Than Ever

Reported by Vogue.

Something shifted in fashion when the cost of making things — images, campaigns, entire brand universes — dropped to nearly zero. What used to require significant investment and human friction now gets generated in seconds, and the result is an industry awash in content that looks like everything and means nothing. The critics have a name for it: AI slop. The more diplomatic framing is "sameness." Either way, the problem is real, and it's accelerating.

According to Vogue, the antidote isn't better technology — it's taste. And not taste as aesthetic preference or Pinterest-board curation, but taste as conviction. "It's a broad way of describing judgment, discernment, and context — not just what you know, but how you apply it," says Tony Wang, founder of OAS, a strategy consultancy whose client list includes Prada, Chanel, and Cartier. The distinction matters because AI has already democratized the knowledge layer — references, trend data, cultural context — driving the cost of that information close to zero. What it cannot replicate is the willingness to back a decision, to say this is the thing and mean it. That conviction layer, Wang argues, is where taste actually lives.

Restraint Is the New Flex

The brands making this tangible aren't doing it by producing more — they're doing it by producing less, and more deliberately. Violet Grey, the luxury American beauty retailer, runs every product through a vetting committee of dermatologists, aestheticians, and makeup professionals; at least 80% must rate it exceptional before it touches the shelves. "It could be my sister's brand," CEO Sherif Guirgis told Vogue. "If it doesn't pass the committee, it's not going on." The retailer's stores are intentionally compact — designed to feel like a glamorous friend's vanity rather than a retail floor — and Guirgis has no plans to scale past that. The short-term trade-off is revenue. The long-term return is a customer who treats visiting Violet Grey like a ritual. That's not an accident. That's a point of view held under commercial pressure.

Risk is the other half of the equation. AI, at its structural core, is a probability engine — trained to produce the most coherent, most statistically likely output. In brand terms, that's safe work. Legible work. Work that doesn't lose, but also never wins. The counterexample keeps coming up: A24, whose director-first, story-obsessed model looked like a bad business decision until Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars and crossed $100 million at the box office. Or Acne Studios casting Kylie Jenner — shot in oiled, dirty denim by photographer Carlijn Jacobs — during a tenure when the brand was known for its deliberately low-key, anti-celebrity aesthetic. "There are ways brands can surprise," says Isabella Burley, Acne Studios' former CMO and founder of Climax Books, who made the call. It worked because the image-making was so distinctly Acne that the disruption only sharpened the brand's identity rather than diluting it.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham put it plainly earlier this year: "When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make." In a landscape where infinite content is now the baseline, the scarcest resource isn't creative output — it's the judgment to know what's worth making, the discipline to stop there, and the nerve to defend it.

Read the original at Vogue.