The Style Files : The Good versus the Bad... Taste Debate! 

Of late, it seems wherever I go people seem to be involved in discussions about good taste. I mean, who's to say what represents good or bad taste? To a degree, good taste can be down to family conditioning, having a good eye for it, a gift or talent - something one is born with. Whether or not any of these characteristics are accurate, is another debate in itself!

Fashion is sometimes characterized as being about conformity, an industry intent on persuading the individual consumer to buy an endless series of uniforms from one season to the next. Put like that you might see fashion as boring or worse a sinister conspiracy. (Just remember Orwell’s 1984 where Big Brother demands that party members wear regulation clothes; and freedom is found only in nakedness).

Yet the history of fashion is marked by rebellion: of outsiders defining themselves by their difference. Gabriel Chanel with her remarkable talent for looking entirely herself and staying true to it chose to adapt masculine tailoring for comfort, her gamine chic also represented a kick against conformity, a determined rejection of the corsets of the Belle Epoque. When she introduced her iconic Little Black dress in the 1920’s it was hailed by some as the democratisation of fashion. She transformed the traditional colour of mourning into a mark of independence, freedom and strength, which by a great many in that era was considered to be in the worst possible taste.

Consider a woman and her perception of what makes an outfit good. I, for example, may absolutely love the way Victoria Beckham looked in a recent photo shot by Patrick Demarchelier for Australian Vogue, where she is wearing  a Louis Vuitton dress. I can appreciate why she wore it, the point she’s making and the reason it worked but (financial considerations aside) that doesn’t mean that I should try to emulate the look, too.

Just because some people may not wear clothes that I like or dress the way that I do does not mean that their taste —  opinion on style, and understanding of why something does or does not work — is off.

Kim Kardashian, one of the most photographed women on the planet, post Kanye, has started investigating fashions more subversive elements. The power of otherness, finding beauty in what was previously deemed ugly. The impact of her relationship?

Today, in the art world if you were to speak of having good taste you would be laughed at, seen as old fashioned and out of touch, told to ‘check your privilege’. Nothing is worse than saying one art work is definitively better than another, and that everyone else should think so too, shouldn’t the same apply to fashion?

Perhaps the pertinent question is not what makes for bad taste in fashion. Rather, it is about how our everyday experiences and relationships might influence the ways in which we dress, and cause us to revisit or resist definitions of taste.

By Minoli Ratnayake