The People Who Built My Taste

How borrowed beauty, quiet observation, and cultural fragments shaped a personal archive of style.

By The Treasurer

I didn't grow up with taste. I borrowed it from people I wanted to be.  

From magazines, movie stills, girls on the train, and celebrities ranging from effortless beauty such as Jane Birkin to the calculated cool of Sofia Coppola. I watched closely and learned that taste wasn’t just about what you wore, rather it was how you existed.  

A certain silence. A pair of sunglasses worn inside. The refusal to explain.  

Then taste came to me in the way someone held a coffee cup like a cigarette or turned their head slightly before answering a question. It was in restraint more than excess. In the ability to leave things out. In the decision to wear no makeup at all, except a red lip that said everything without having to explain anything. 

I admired people who never over-articulated their style, who dressed like they had somewhere better to be but weren’t in a rush to get there. People who curated their lives like a moodboard, not out of vanity, but instinct. 

At some point, I stopped looking for trends and started noticing gestures. The way someone wrote a lowercase caption or underlined something in pencil. I found taste in the way people lived, quietly but deliberately. In routines, collections, the objects they kept on their nightstand. In the scent they wore like punctuation. 

It wasn’t about being fashionable. It was about having a point of view and knowing when to keep it to yourself.  

We live in a time obsessed with curation. Instagram grids. TikTok archetypes. “Girl trends” that rise and fall within weeks. But long before algorithms, taste was always a kind of authorship. A form of quiet self-construction.  

My own taste was shaped by women who felt real, but also just out of reach. 

Devon Lee Carlson made style feel playful again, like dressing was an inside joke between you and the mirror.  

Kate Moss showed me that imperfection could be iconic. That you could be undone and still unforgettable. 

Bella Hadid became a modern reference point: someone whose look shifts constantly, but whose presence always feels intentional. 

Even the Kardashians Jenners, who are often reduced to spectacle, taught me something I’ve come to admire: control. The ability to transform, to narrate, to define yourself in your own terms, even when the world tries to define it for you. 

And then there’s Hailey Bieber. A woman whose aesthetic influence is flattened into tabloid narratives or reduced to who she married. But to me, she’s a masterclass in restraint. She’s someone who curates rather than collects. Who makes even a bare face feel like a statement. While the internet debates headlines, she’s refining a visual language. And that, to me, is what taste really is, choosing consistency over noise. Editing with intention. Saying more by doing less. 

I wasn’t raised with taste. Not in the traditional sense. There were no designer pieces passed down. No French-girl mother. No inherited cool. 

But I inherited something else: fragments. A look on the train. A phrase underlined in a stranger’s book. The sound of a girl’s heels as she steps onto marble. A passing scent that made the air feel expensive. A hair clip left behind on a bathroom sink. 

I kept these fragments. Studied them. Tried them on. Some stuck, some didn’t. But slowly, they became a kind of archive. Not of trends—but of instincts. 

Taste, I realized, is a form of emotional editing. It’s knowing what you’re drawn to without always knowing why. It’s not perfection. It’s pattern recognition. 

I still don’t know if I have good taste. But I do know what stays with me. 

Because maybe taste is about knowing what feels like you, even if you borrowed it first. And choosing to keep it. 

Regards,

the treasurer.