How to build taste (without buying your way there)

At some point, someone tells you that you have “a look,” and you spend the years after either protecting that look like it’s precious, or abandoning it entirely for whatever look seems to be working for everyone else. Most of us do a bit of both, usually without noticing.

Then one day you open your closet and none of it feels like yours anymore. It feels like a version of you that got assembled from other people’s outfits, without you ever quite deciding to become her.

“How to recreate the CBK look?” “CBK styled headbands” “It-girl of the year”

Last year it was Hailey Bieber, this year it’s Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. The concept of society dictating your ‘taste’ is more common than you’d think. It reminds me of that one line from The Devil Wears Prada when Miranda refers to Andy’s sweater in regard to her disinterest in fashion, “That blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

So that exact ‘pile of stuff’ that your closet was filled with could’ve been shades of burgundy & cherry reds last year, whereas this year it could be Bandage dresses and Jelly footwear.

While there’s nothing wrong with buying either of those things. What you’ve lost in that moment isn’t your style. It’s your taste. And taste was never something you had to buy your way into. It just went quiet for a while, buried under everyone else’s.

It’s realizing that the dress you were obsessed with six months ago suddenly looks like someone else’s decision.

Taste was never about owning more of it

You stand there and recognize every item. You bought all of them. You chose all of them. And somehow none of them feel like yours. That’s a very strange kind of grief.

We’ve absorbed this idea that having a “look” means having a closet stacked with options. But some of the most enduring style icons built entire identities out of a handful of choices, worn again and again with total conviction.

Sharmila Tagore wore her sarees the same effortless way for decades, and that repetition is exactly what made it hers. Rekha has been working the same silhouette and the same kohl for longer than most of us have been alive, and it has never once looked tired. Their style was never a rotation of new things. It was a point of view, repeated until it became unmistakable.

Nobody remembers these women for how much they owned. They remember them for how sure they seemed.

Rekha ji’s fierce, unapologetic energy shows up in that striking, sharp kohl and those dramatic, richly saturated saree shades. Sharmila Tagore’s grace showed up the same way, in soft chiffon and georgette, draped simply, in a style that’s still hers even now.

Their taste was a mirror of their individuality. So, no. Wearing a tight black button-down will not let you acquire the aura of CBK, but authenticity is what will.

Where most of us actually lose the thread

Somewhere between school and your first real job, you start dressing for an audience instead of yourself. You buy the piece everyone’s wearing this wedding season because it feels safer than trusting your own instinct. You save outfit after outfit to a folder you never open again, and none of it looks like anything you’d actually reach for on an ordinary Tuesday.

The issue was never bad taste. It’s that you were never given the room to find out what your taste actually was, because you were too busy accumulating to ever sit still with it.

This is, quietly, where renting has an advantage buying never will.

Some experiments fail. That’s the point.

I’ve started thinking about fashion less as self-expression and more as self-experimentation. Sometimes I try something because I genuinely think I’ll become the person who wears it. A structured gown, a silk set in a colour I’d never normally choose, something I saw on someone whose whole presence I wanted to borrow for one evening. Most of the time, I’m wrong. I wear it, I feel like I’m holding my breath the whole night, and I’m relieved when it’s over, without that mistake sitting in my cupboard as a reminder afterwards.

But occasionally, a piece feels so natural that I wonder if I’ve actually known that version of myself all along, and I just hadn’t met her yet. That happened with a yellow floral sundress I almost didn’t wear because it felt too soft, too simple, next to the confidence everyone else in the room seemed to be dressed in. I remember standing in front of the mirror before leaving, waiting to feel like I was playing dress-up the way I usually do in anything new, trying to pose a certain way to imitate a certain style. It never came. I just felt like myself, slightly better lit, and much freer.

I don’t think you find your style by studying it. I think you find it by accident, in the fifteen minutes before you leave the house, in the outfit you almost didn’t wear, in the one piece that made you stop mid-scroll for no reason you can articulate. The mistakes matter just as much as the piece that finally fits, maybe more, because you don’t know what’s actually you until you’ve stood next to a few versions that clearly weren’t.

The real luxury isn’t owning it. It’s recognising it as yours.

I don’t think I’ve ever regretted having bad taste. I’ve only ever regretted ignoring my own. Style was never really about what something cost or how long you’d owned it. It was about how certain I felt standing in it. And it turns out I needed to borrow a few wrong answers before I recognised the right one.

So if your closet is starting to feel like it belongs to someone you don’t recognise anymore, I don’t think the fix is buying more of her. I think it’s giving yourself permission to try on a few people you’re not sure about, until you find the one who was you the whole time.

Happy SWRLing.