When Taste Is All Over TikTok

Subscribe to High Margin by Robert Williams: perspectives on creativity and business in the world of luxury.

First it was my dad sneakers. Then it was my Paraboots, my neighbourhood paella joint. Chez Ammar, La Palette, Charvet.

We are living through the great blowing up of everyone’s spot. Here in Paris, TikTok has become saturated in recent weeks with something more insidious than “core” trends ever were: the viral recommendation slider, in which obvious, hyped destinations are often interspersed with low-key neighboruhood haunts that used to take years of experience to suss out. In a city already overrun by tourists, content creators are scraping up every last self-selecting experience and offering it up to the algorithm.

Mainstream exposure is nothing new. Sneaker companies have long talked about “managing the hype cycle.” But the breakneck pace at which brands, products and styling cues can be packaged, explained and broadcast to the world via TikTok’s “For You” page has significant implications for the way cultural meaning is communicated. For fashion brands that trade in large part on their social and cultural capital, it’s both a blessing and a curse.

Deeper knowledge of the multiplicity of ways in which fashion can be used to advertise wealth and cultural mastery has fuelled surging demand for luxury, particularly since the pandemic. Luxury’s customer base used to be divided between mostly “expert” shoppers and newbies expected to gravitate to logos. Now there are many more customers who fall somewhere in between: infrequent luxury buyers who can nonetheless clock a Cartier Love bracelet or an Hermès’ double-tour, Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato, Margiela’s four stitches or Tabi toes. Social media’s shift to video has accelerated the process: Products don’t need to be eye-catching the way they did on Instagram’s grid to provide fodder for face-to-camera dissection, feeding awareness for the likes of Loro Piana and The Row.

For the most part, this has been good for business: Whereas the Instagram grid powered recognition, TikTok and Reels are also able to convey context about what a brand or aesthetic means, what it might say about the wearer. Which extends the sense of a product’s value beyond what someone’s own visual literacy may be able to discern.

“Attention is becoming less valuable than legibility. Legibility is the top cultural currency for brands,” marketing expert Ana Andjelic wrote in a recent newsletter.

But if the cultural meaning of products is becoming more universally legible, their ability to signal status — demonstrating taste that sets one apart from the pack — is declining. This dilemma isn’t just the province of top luxury brands and their hero products: The cultural capital associated with all manner of niche brands, styling cues or lifestyle choices (from grandpa pants to gyms, from trail sneakers to travel plans) has become weaker due to the speed at which trends spread. One minute you think a product signals individual taste, the next it’s been absorbed by a viral trend.

If everyone is stylish, no one is stylish. The same goes for rich or cool: This is the fundamental impulse in human psychology that brands tap into. Much of fashion’s value depends on its ability to help people communicate status — not just as a function of wealth, but discernment and taste à la Bourdieu.

Existing elites — whom brands are counting on more and more to drive sales in a stagnant economy that is no longer pumping out newly minted millionaires — are prone to abandon symbols of taste and status once they become accessible to the wider world. Brands are struggling to reconcile that with the speed and transparency of style discourse today.

As the broader consumer world doubles down on “legibility,” I have to wonder if fashion might do well to run the opposite direction. A few months before Ana Andjelic’s newsletter, independent fashion journal “Many of Them” had caught my attention by arguing the opposite: “We must be illegible!” the cover read, taking research by American cultural theorist Jack Halberstam as the inspiration for the issue. “To resist the dominant order that demands everyone be legible in terms of binary systems, we should enter into a murkier, fugitive state,” its editors explained.

I had that tension in mind as I watched Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior a few weeks ago: He showed teased-out party wigs, sequinned (Poiret-inspired) tank tops and extravagant Orientalist capes. If you couldn’t tell what he was going for, maybe that was the point?

The same goes for Julian Klausner’s Dries Van Noten show, a highlight of the menswear season for many, which featured collegiate style reinterpreted in a deliberately garish mash-up of patterns and proportions. The message had something to do with setting off for school, wearing what you were able to dig up in the family trunks. But the music was a song about spring flowers — in Japanese.

Illegibility was in the spotlight at Dior couture as well: Anderson’s conceptual debut underscored his longstanding relationship with contemporary art — an industry whose cultural appeal relies heavily on illegibility as a means of gatekeeping. Artworks are often hard to decode without the help of an ecosystem of curators and institutions, who are also charged with determining their value.

By adopting the curatorial approach that underpinned Anderson’s tenure at Loewe, Dior may be able to tap into a similar mindset — creating a cultural maze that makes customers feel like insiders. Its haute couture could target art-adjacent collectors, who may accept challenging aesthetics as evidence of creative edge. (Prada, Chanel, Cartier and Vuitton are also among the brands to have aligned themselves extensively with contemporary art through corporate philanthropy.)

Are we entering a new age of encrypted luxury?