Vreelandian Notes on Taste

Connoisseurship vs curation

We desperately need the return of the connoisseur - the person who sees beyond the surface and recognises quality as an objective reality, not a social currency.

The connoisseur’s gaze is uncompromising: no trends, no algorithms. They understand that taste is not democratic. It cannot be crowdsourced or monetised without losing its essence. The absence of the connoisseur results in the state of aesthetic anxiety: we have a mise-en-scene and some noise, but no plot.

The eye has to travel, said Diana Vreeland. She believed that taste cannot be formed in isolation. It feels almost radical nowadays as we are on a depth diet that reinforces (and rewards) sameness. For her, seeing was an active, deliberate practise. The eye had to be trained, shaped by exposure to art, history, eccentricity, and the unexpected and extraordinary. There is no free lunch without seeing beyond your own world - through books, art, film, foreign cultures, and people. An openness to difference and a willingness to be surprised and transformed is a must.

The eye no longer travels. We are bombarded with images, but they don’t expand our horizons, they shrink them. Without travel - whether literal or metaphorical - the eye is dull and unoriginal. But glamour needs eccentricity - the truest form of it is always about risk and rebellion, not uniformity and perfection. Glamour is selfhood. But now, we somehow have a generation of people arranging their props without ever stepping into the story. Yet the stage is set.

The transcendent has been replaced by the imminent, and it’s boring. No acute sense of self, no rarity, no interiority. The platforms we use have transformed taste into an economy of scale where value is determined by visibility and virality. This is the antithesis of Vreeland’s philosophy. Glamour, by its very nature, cannot be viral. It is predicated on the very idea of being unattainable.

We need to stop commodifying narrative and flattening eccentricity into palatability. True chic is liberation - and the audacity to stop caring.

If you don’t believe me, pull out any old issue of Vogue - the women aren’t performing. They are lounging, draped across sofas or propped against mirrors, half-lost in thought. They never care. There’s a cigarette dangling from their fingers, or a silk robe slipping off their shoulders. They are indifferent to the gaze, and that’s why you can’t look away. As if they are quietly reminding you: don’t chase - embody.