Algorithmic Taste, Human Style
Your feed expands your taste, your actual life edits your style.
A few years ago I bought a silk slip dress I swore was going to change my life. I’d seen some version of it it on the runway, then on Instagram, then again on some chic stranger in Paris. You know the kind. Bias cut, slinky, beautiful. Much like the Döen dress I evaluated here.
Friends, I wore it once. To dinner. Spent most of the night tugging at the straps and calculating how many dry-clean runs it would take before the thing actually cost less than a flight to Europe.
That was the moment I realized: there’s what you love, and then there’s what you live in.
Taste vs. style.
Taste is easy
Taste is the Pinterest board. The “save for later” tab. The scrolling at 1 a.m. when suddenly you’ve decided your future self only wears gauzy linen in Tuscany or razor-sharp tailoring in Tokyo.
Taste is greedy. It says yes to everything. Sequins and cowboy boots? Love. Japanese minimalism and French froufrou? Also love. There is NOTHING wrong in loving arts of all kinds from all different sources, right? Nothing is broken with you if this is you. I believe this is most people.
And you should love widely! Taste makes you sharper. It’s a playground.
Style is harder
Style is what survives contact with your calendar, your climate, your commute. It’s the version of taste that fits your actual body and actual life. And your preferences for HOW YOU WANT TO SHOW UP. This is so important! No Pinterest board will ever tell you that. I do not go into the how in this post, but I have written before on this topic. Do check them out: Lines and Shapes series, How I found my personal style, and How I made style words work for myself.
If taste is your universe, style is your orbit.
The silk dress lived happily in my taste. But in my style, dead on arrival. Too much fuss. Too much care. Too much sexiness. Zero repeatability.
Why taste feels louder now
Our feeds are designed to balloon taste until it’s bigger than our closets, bigger than our budgets, bigger than our lives.
Every week a new “core” is born, peaks, and dies before the shipping label on your package has even printed. It’s not your fault you want more than you can wear, your feed is literally engineered to expand your appetite.
But the algorithm doesn’t know your dog walk schedule. It doesn’t know your office has arctic air-con or that you hate carrying a coat. It doesn’t know you like to feel creative in your outfits. Or that dopamine dressing is the one joy you feel in your life currently. Or that wearing all black makes you feel powerful when the world at large renders you powerless. That’s where taste stops and style begins.
Style is embodied
Here’s the part that gets overlooked: clothes don’t just express us, they change us.
That slip dress didn’t just annoy me with its straps. It made me smaller. Self-conscious. A little apologetic. And that wasn’t the energy I wanted to bring into the room.
Other pieces do the opposite. The structured black blazer that makes me stand taller. The balloon skirt that lets me swish dramatically through a grocery aisle. Style isn’t just what looks good—it’s what makes you feel powerful, capable, free.
How I filter taste into style
Here’s the 20-minute ritual I use when I catch myself screenshotting like a magpie:
Pick three things you love. Go to your saves. Which looks still spark after a week?
Extract the essence. Write down silhouette, color, texture. Not the whole outfit—just the building blocks.
Reality check. Run them through five filters: climate, calendar, how you want to show up, care, budget.
Test drive. Build one outfit for this week.
Decide. If it survives? It’s style. If not? It can live happily in your taste folder.
The affordance trick
Here’s a designer-brain way to think about it: clothes have affordances—things they let your body do.
A pocket affords carrying.
A flat shoe affords walking ten blocks.
A blazer with structure affords authority.
If an item fails the affordances your life demands, it’s still beautiful. But it’s not your style.
A better math than CPW (we are getting advanced here but I believe y’all are ready!)
Everyone talks about cost-per-wear, but I think it misses the point. What about time costs? What about how an outfit makes you feel?
My new math is:
True CPW = (Price + Care + Time) ÷ (Wears × Power)
Where “Power” is my highly scientific rating of how much the outfit makes me feel like myself turned up to eleven.
By that measure, my $20 vintage bomber that makes me feel commanding is worth ten times more than the silk dress that made me shrink.
And yes this is not a scientific mathematical formula, but you get the point right? We NEED to factor in how something feels. EVEN IF you can make something work, if you feel like shit every time you wear it, it is a net loss.
The takeaway
Before I buy, I run through this:
Repeatability: Will I reach for it five times this month?
Compatibility: Does it play with at least three things I already own?
Accountability: Does it make me feel stronger, not smaller?
If the answer is no, it’s not style—it’s just taste. And taste is allowed to stay in the folder, guilt-free.
Think of it like this:
Taste is everything beautiful at the buffet.
Style is what you actually put on your plate.
And the more honest you are about your plate, the more delicious your style feels.
Try this: In the comments, tell me the one piece that lives forever in your taste but never quite makes it into your style. (Mine is still Zimmermann lace-y tops. Gorgeous, but not for my dogs-plus-office-plus-Los Angeles life.)
Any kind of black loafer! Especially with croc finish and silver thingies on. God I wish I was that girl, but I 100% am not. I like thinking about it this way: I want to want to be a loafer-wearer. But I am not going to change myself into being one. Wanting to want something is fun, but you don't want it. It's like thinking "oh boy I really wish I wanted kids so I could relate to my friends more". I don't want kids, I just want to feel closer to my friends. Back to the loafers: I don't actually want loafers, I just want to feel like a cool loafer-wearing-person. Which is fine, but it's not my style :)
Blazers! Love them on everyone else but I don't like them on me