here, have a taste: May 2025 braindump
Fashion, cinema, interior design, vampires — literally all of my favorite things.
I’ve been charged with being “fancy” and “top shelf.” I argue I’m not. I like to think I have something Carter Davis Johnson thinks everyone should have—taste. I’m so glad we’re talking about this!
god save us from terrible fashion
I really should write my rants down the first time they occur in my head, but I think about fashion a lot. It’s the most persistent, most immediate, and most individually controllable aesthetic dimension. What we do within this dimension says a lot about who we are and how we are. So I was excited to come across the aforementioned Mr. Johnson’s essay, The Crushing Sameness of Modern Style, in which he laments that, among both men and women, fashion sensibilities have somewhat coalesced into indistinguishable blah—men in their sweatpants and “brocolli haircuts,” ladies in their faded jeans and generic tops (skewing, of course, for region, class, and generational or subcultural differences).
Our style is not only inward facing, but it’s also wildly and creepily the same.
(One reason for this, I think, is in-bred risk aversion. We don’t want to offend, cross lines, or draw the wrong kind of attention. We refuse to stand out, so we blend in.)
There are two ways we’re primed to deal with this condition—and both are ways I’d discourage. Some will be inclined to embrace the weird and avant-garde as a rebellion against modern style. But we all don’t need to play Met Gala levels of dress-up—and rebellion for rebellion’s sake is boring anyway. We must be driven by more than that. Others will be inclined to look to the past and say yesterday’s style was better than today’s. But yesterday’s style belonged to yesterday. We live in the now—in a society that draws on and interacts with the past but must be conscious of its own potential for the future.
The solution? According to Johnson:
…we need to develop taste… As an aesthetic faculty, taste (by definition) distinguishes… taste notices differences, makes distinctions, and judges between them. We can oppose the sameness of modern style by simply having an opinion.
Anything does not (should not) go. We must be tasteful, discerning, and intentional about fashion.1
Johnson’s essay is a follow-up to The Irony of Modern Men’s Style, in which he elaborates on the “civic action” of dressing “within society.”
FoxxeHole sent me Regina Doman’s piece on why Why the Way We Dress has Changed.
elle jones’s piece everyone is sexy and no one is erotic is also related to this topic generally (similar problem, similar solution)
cinemathis, cinemathat
As a writer, some of my most potent inspiration has come not from other writing, but from film, music, television, nature, and science. I’ve shared before about the necessity of cross-disciplinary pollination and the importance of art influencing other art. Nowhere is this more needed than in film culture.
“…it is dangerously easy to obsess over films at the expense of other art forms,” Ed William writes in We’re Free! Escaping Closed-Loop Cinema.
How many books have the people who log 1000 films a year on Letterboxd read? How many galleries have they visited? How many plays have they seen? Cinema culture has become painfully movie-brained. When we only watch movies, they begin to remind us only of other movies.
I found some other interesting pieces in this space…
How to Make an Original Movie (When Everything’s Been Done) also by Ed William
Hannah Long’s review of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, A Graceless Exit
cultural collapse or not
I enjoyed Spencer Kornhaber’s report in The Atlantic—Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?—not least because some of the examples he uses to push back against the claim/narrative that culture is stagnant are things I enjoy. It also made me feel better about not listening so much to the music of my parents’ generation.
The New Yorker has a portfolio piece of pictures of famous people posing pretentiously in their living rooms. Good gazing for interior design fodder.
And speaking of The New Yorker, I took a detour through the Century of the New Yorker exhibit at the New York Public Library recently. Such a rich, dramatic story to this publication.
other things i read that deserve a shoutout
One the off-chance you could become a vampire, how would you decide whether or not to be one? Don’t look at me funny. Look at Luke Burgis’ piece Becoming a Vampire. It’s a (very good) essay about transformation and choosing what we believe and what we decide to become.
What the vampire thought-experiment finally convinced me of is this: the biggest decisions in life can’t be solved by rational calculus alone. At some point you leap—then keep leaping, day after day, learning who you are only by becoming it.
I also recommend…
Susannah Black Roberts’ The Birth of Comedy, which is an older piece that I read for the first time.
Oh, and if you do like vampires, stay tuned for the next thing published on this substack.
extra, extra
What else went on this month?
I listened to Jonathan Pageau’s interesting take on (Kan)Ye and the principle of watching the fool.
I’m going to start listening to Triptych Conversations, a podcast which asks, among other things, “What if Bille Eilish, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Cassian Andor walked into a bar ?” (Hosted by Mark Meynell, Sophie Killingley, and Joel Bain)
And one more time in case you missed it…my latest essay out in Mere Orthodoxy.
pagan signs on the Christian path
I’ve got a new essay out in Mere Orthodoxy, in which I examine the resurfacing of pagan sensibilities in the U.S. and England and argue that “the path out of a post-Christian world might well be marked by pagan signs.” The old myths whisper again! And a culture which thought itself sufficiently secular is now lighting candl…
There is good fashion stuff out there: like the white pant-suit look shared by Zendaya and Anna Sawai at the Met Gala this year. (The girlies have duly informed me that it’s Zen-day-uh, not Zen-die-uh—day as in slay. I may have been saying it wrong.) Also, Her Royal Highness Blue Ivy Carter is killing it as Beyonce’s mini-me and the “America Has A Problem” jumpsuit look is fire.
Can’t believe for once I’ve read two articles on your list!! So much to chat about on fashion and how everyone wears the bleeding same! (More charity shop, less primark is what UK teens need in my opinion).
Ahh thanks Daniel!