words by velin

Taste is not an inheritance. It is not stumbled upon in a moment of inspiration or plucked from the ether of aesthetic trends. Taste is honed through repetition, scrutiny, and a kind of quiet obsession. It does not descend; it accumulates.

To cultivate taste, one must first obsess, not passively, but with rigor. The kind of obsession that draws you back, again and again, to a single mood, texture, era, or tone. Those with a distinctive sensibility are rarely generalists. They are specialists in the niche they cannot stop circling. They know the subtleties. The variations. The imperfections. Their style does not emerge from novelty, it emerges from devotion.

Yet obsession, without exposure, becomes insular. And taste, without reference, lacks depth. Just as a child might proclaim vanilla the pinnacle of flavor without having encountered saffron, sea salt, or miso, the untraveled eye lacks the range to discern. To develop discernment, one must seek unfamiliarity. Attend to artworks that provoke discomfort. Listen to music that resists immediate pleasure. Engage with fashion, architecture, cinema, and cuisine that destabilize. Through this process, one acquires not just preference but perspective.

Openness is what allows obsession to evolve. Without permeability, style becomes mimicry. The most resonant expressions of taste are those that absorb contradiction. A mind drawn to brutalist restraint might find unexpected kinship in Venetian ornamentation. What once felt like divergence becomes enrichment. Openness is not about dilution, it is about expansion. It ensures that your obsessions breathe.

And then, there are trends so often maligned, yet undeniably telling. Trends are not rules; they are reflections. They signal what the collective psyche is yearning for, rebelling against, or processing. To reject them entirely is to disengage from the cultural moment. To incorporate them discerningly is to engage in a deeper dialogue between self and society. Style, after all, does not exist in isolation. It is shaped in relation to the world around it.

Because ultimately, style is not a surface. It is a system of selection. It is the way you interpret, edit, and arrange. It is your ability to draw a deliberate line through the noise and say: this belongs to me. Not because it’s popular. Not because it’s safe. But because it resonates on a frequency only you are tuned to.

To cultivate taste is to train the senses until intuition becomes articulate. To shape style is to give that intuition a structure, a signature, a silhouette. It is an act of refinement but also of resistance. A rejection of the generic in favor of the personal. A commitment to curation over accumulation. And above all, an insistence on meaning.

Taste, in the end, does not announce itself. It gathers quietly in glances, in gestures, in the things left unsaid. It is sculpted in stillness, over time, until it takes on a presence of its own. Subtle, deliberate, and entirely unmistakable like a shadow cast just so.