What Did You Like Before You Knew It Was Cool?

I’ve been thinking lately about the things I liked before I knew I was supposed to like them. Not necessarily things I discovered before everyone else. I don't mean that in an I liked it first way. I mean the things I was drawn to before I had enough awareness to know whether they were fashionable, tasteful, outdated, impressive or part of an aesthetic with a name.

I think those things probably tell us more about our personal taste than most of what we save on Pinterest now.

When I was younger, I wasn't thinking about whether something fit into the version of myself I wanted other people to see. If I liked a dress, I liked the dress. If I loved the way someone's house looked, I wasn't mentally categorizing it as English country or French provincial. I wasn't wondering whether the restaurant was cool enough to post. There wasn't nearly as much explanation involved.

Somewhere along the way, we became very aware of what everything means.

I think we know too much about what is cool

There is something strange about having constant access to other people's taste.

You can open your phone in the morning and, within twenty minutes, be introduced to a new restaurant, coat, workout, book, hotel, kitchen, skincare product and way of decorating your Christmas tree. You see something enough times and eventually it becomes difficult to remember whether you actually liked it or simply became familiar with it.

I've caught myself doing this. Something I wouldn't have looked twice at suddenly starts seeming appealing after I've seen six women I think are stylish wearing it. A destination I had never particularly thought about starts feeling urgent because everyone seems to be there. Even completely ordinary things can somehow become objects of desire once they are photographed correctly.

I don't think influence is inherently bad. Other people introduce us to wonderful things all the time. Some of my favourite discoveries have come from seeing what someone else was wearing, reading or eating.

But I do think it is worth noticing how easily repetition can disguise itself as personal taste.

The clothes you loved before you understood fashion

Fashion vs. personal style is probably where I notice this most.

Before I understood trends properly, I already knew there were certain things I liked. I liked femininity and was always drawn to specific style icons like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. I liked extravagant gowns and dresses, lace, florals and clothes that felt a little more special than they technically needed to be. I liked getting dressed properly even when there wasn't a particularly important reason to.

Those preferences have changed and matured, obviously, but the foundation is still there. That matters to me because fashion gives us a new identity to try on approximately every six months. One year we're supposed to dress like we've inherited an estate in the English countryside. Then we're in Copenhagen. Then we're inexplicably obsessed with cowboys. Eventually something you've owned for ten years becomes fashionable again, and the internet informs you that you can finally wear it.

It can be fun. I participate in trends too. I just don't want to wake up one day with a wardrobe full of evidence of what everyone else liked for me.

The older I get, the more interested I am in returning to the things I have always found beautiful and letting fashion occasionally add to them rather than replace them.

Your childhood bedroom probably knew something

I love thinking about childhood bedrooms for this reason.

They were often completely unedited. Maybe you had an inexplicable attachment to a certain colour. Maybe you covered a wall in photographs, collected little boxes, wanted everything floral, loved old furniture or insisted on a chandelier that made absolutely no sense in a suburban bedroom.

It probably wasn't sophisticated, but it was yours.

Now there is so much pressure for our homes to make visual sense. You can identify entire apartments by the decade in which their owners decorated them. The same chair appears. The same lamp appears. Suddenly everyone has decided that one particular shade of butter yellow is the answer.

I would rather someone's house contain a few things I don't understand.

I like homes where you can tell that objects arrived at different times. Something inherited beside something new. A slightly ridiculous object brought home from a trip. A chair someone refuses to get rid of because they've had it forever. Things that would never appear together on a mood board but somehow make sense because they belong to the same person.

I think that is much more interesting than getting every decision technically right.

The food you liked before food became an identity

Food has somehow become another way we explain ourselves.

There are foods associated with wellness, foods associated with being cultured, restaurants associated with being fashionable and ingredients that suddenly seem to appear in everyone's kitchen at exactly the same time.

Meanwhile, some of the best things we eat are things we've loved forever.

There are meals your family makes that would never become a trend. The fruit you wait for every summer. A very specific way you like your eggs. The soup you want when you're sick. The restaurant you've been going to for years even though there are fifteen newer ones you're technically supposed to try.

I care about eating healthy and having fresh, nourishing food at home. I'm willing to spend more on good produce and organic ingredients when it matters to me because food is something I interact with every single day. But I also don't want eating well to become another performance of having impeccable taste.

Sometimes I want the beautiful seasonal salad. Sometimes I want the exact meal I've been ordering since I was twelve.

Both can belong to the same person.

The books, films and music you actually return to

I think one of the easiest ways to figure out what you genuinely like is to look at what you return to when nobody is watching.

Not the book sitting beautifully on your nightstand. The one you actually read.

Not the film you're glad to say you've seen. The one you put on again when you're home on a Sunday and don't know what else to watch.

There are movies I love partly because of the world they let me live in for two hours. I notice the homes, clothes, restaurants, dialogue and tiny details of how people live. Sometimes that matters to me as much as the plot. I don't need to pretend every film I love is an intellectual experience. Sometimes I just want a Nancy Meyers kitchen and people wearing really good coats.

The same goes for books. I want to read classics because I'm genuinely interested in them, not because I want to construct the bookshelf of someone who reads classics.

There is a difference, and I think we usually know when we're doing it.

Taste should have a few inconsistencies

The people whose taste I find most interesting are rarely completely consistent.

Someone can love antique furniture and extremely modern art. She can wear a beautiful vintage dress with completely ordinary shoes. She can know everything about wine and still have an embarrassingly specific fast-food order. She can stay in beautiful hotels and refuse to spend money on something everyone else considers essential.

I like those inconsistencies because they are usually where the person shows up.

When everything you like fits perfectly beneath one aesthetic, I think it is worth asking whether you actually developed that taste or simply became very good at following its rules.

Real taste is allowed to ruin the mood board.

You don't have to stop liking something once everyone else does

There is another side to this that bothers me just as much. Sometimes we abandon things we genuinely like because they become too popular.

A restaurant gets discovered and suddenly the people who loved it first don't want to go anymore. A handbag becomes ubiquitous and now owning it apparently means you lack originality. A destination becomes popular and everyone starts looking for the place that will replace it.

I understand wanting something different. I love discovering things that feel special too. But if I loved something yesterday, I don't want somebody else's approval of it to make me dislike it today.

Being particular isn't the same as being contrarian. The goal isn't to have taste nobody else understands. It's to have enough confidence in your own that popularity doesn't determine whether you're allowed to enjoy something.

I want to be harder to persuade

Maybe that is ultimately what I want from developing personal taste.

I want to be harder to persuade.

Not impossible to influence. That would be both unrealistic and boring. I want people to show me things I've never considered. I want to travel somewhere because a friend couldn't stop talking about it, try a restaurant because someone swears the pasta is incredible and occasionally buy the dress I've seen everywhere because, unfortunately, I really do love it.

I just want there to be a little space between seeing something and deciding I need it.

That space is important for conscious consumption too. If I know what I like, I don't need to reinvent my wardrobe every season. I don't need every new beauty launch. I don't have to replace perfectly good things because a nicer version has appeared on my feed.

Intentional spending becomes much easier when you aren't constantly renegotiating your taste.

What did you like before anyone told you to?

I think this is a genuinely useful question to ask yourself.

What did you wear before you knew what your style was called? What kind of homes did you save before you knew the terminology? What did you order at restaurants before food became content? What books did you disappear into? What did you collect? What colours have you always loved? What places made you want to stay longer?

Some of the answers might embarrass you. I actually think that's a good sign.

You don't need to resurrect every questionable decision you made at fourteen. Taste should evolve. Exposure teaches us things, travel changes us, getting older changes us and sometimes we encounter something new and wonder how we ever lived without it.

But I don't want every old preference polished out of me either.

A lot of what I think about at The Life Extract comes back to the idea that living well should feel like your own life, not a convincing reproduction of somebody else's. And I think remembering what you liked before you knew whether it was cool is one way back to that.

Maybe personal taste isn't something we need to invent as much as we think.

Some of it has probably been there the entire time. All roads eventually lead back to the things that you were drawn to as a child. That is your most natural version of self, before you cared about other perceptions.