Taste, Status, & The Future of Shopping
How and why we express our taste through clothing, and what that means
Incentives…
are the hidden forces that shape our behavior. They help explain why we do the things we do.
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” So said the late and great Charlie Munger.
There is perhaps no more powerful incentive than status.
As Jane Austen discerned: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital."
In his Magnus Opus Status as a Service, Eugene Wei observed two principles regarding human nature.
They are:
People are status-seeking monkeys
People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital
Status is inherently social. It depends on how we are perceived by, and are in relation with, other people. As the 1828 Webster’s dictionary defines, status is:
1 a: position or rank in relation to others
the status of a fatherb: relative rank in a hierarchy of prestige
especially : high prestige
How do we attain and measure status? Commonly, one’s status is often tied to their income, their profession, their employer, or their education. Social media networks, as well, have created new measurements of status in the form of followers and likes.
But not everyone can be a millionaire. Not everyone can go to Harvard. Not everyone can be a celebrity.
Are these the only systems by which we status-seeking monkeys can gain esteem from others?
I posit, no.
The most egalitarian, and persistent, way one gains status, regardless of their socioeconomic station, is through their taste.
We gain status through demonstrating taste.
Taste is like intuition. Everyone has it. It is not something to attain — like say an expensive car or Master’s Degree. It is something nurtured.
To have taste requires two things:
Opinions
Originality
To have taste, one must have an opinion. To have an opinion one must observe the world around them. Observation demands time, energy and focus. Thus taste demands work.
But opinion alone is not enough. Taste, as Brie Wolfson writes, is a mode. It requires interpretation, expression or action. One must synthesize what they observe to form an opinion and then do something with it.
Such action requires originality. Being memetic is the antithesis of having taste. One’s taste is intertwine with their ability to discover their true, authentic Self.
Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”
We give esteem, and social capital, to people with good taste. In many circles, there is nothing more prestigious than having good taste.
Having good taste, I will argue, is the most efficient and durable path to maximizing social capital.
This essay will focus on how we most efficiently express taste: through fashion. We will explore how this occurs in both in our physical and digital worlds.
From there, we will explore the opportunity space that exists by helping people improve their taste through enabling new digital gesture that allows for people to express their taste through fashion online. The quest, ultimately, is to make your taste digitally legible so that your taste can underpin a new experience that powers discovery (utility) and self-expression (social capital) to form a social network for shopping.
The Fashion Game
Taste is the aesthetic of the soul. We imprint our taste into the physical world in different ways, but perhaps no more so than through fashion.
Fashion is the expression of taste through clothing.
While clothing is meant to protect us from the conditions, fashion is about status. We care a lot about fashion.
The average American woman owns 103 pieces of clothing.
Globally, consumers acquire 80 billion new items annually—up 400% from 20 years ago.
In America, we each buy about 68 new garments a year.
Most people wear only 20% of their clothes.
Resale is growing 11x faster than broader retail.
This is big business.
In 2024, the revenue in the Apparel market in the United States amounts to US$358.70bn
In 2024, the revenue in the Luxury Goods market in the United States amounts to US$77.28bn.
Like all status games, fashion is multiplayer. When we wear clothes, we do so in a social setting: at work, around our friends, on the street. We distribute, or share, our expression of taste through our clothing to a large amount of people, and as such, maximize the potential for status.
In this positive-sum game, we compete to express our taste in the quest for status and esteem. It is a contest of skill where the victors are those who best observe trends in the world and authentically interpret them in a way that is original to themselves.
Taste influences three parts of the fashion value chain. These behaviors are:
Discovering
Buying
Wearing
What we discover determines what we buy. What we buy determines what we wear.
Offline, in the physical world, we gain status by expressing our taste through what we wear.
Why does ‘wearing’ most efficiently maximize status through our taste in clothing compared to ‘buying’ and ‘discovering’ in the physical world?
Wearing is most efficient because it is cheap to produce, which makes it universal. What do I mean by cheap to produce? While there is a cost to discovering (time) and buying (financial), there is very little cost to consistently wearing clothes. In fact, there is a much higher social cost to not wearing clothes. All people wear clothes and they do so everyday. Conversely, discovering and buying clothes happen less frequently.
Thus, in the physical world, we produce more expressions of taste through wearing clothing than we do through buying and discovering clothing.
Furthermore, ‘wearing’ is efficient because there is zero marginal cost to distribute these produced expressions of taste. Anyone can see my clothing, and thus my taste, by being in the same physical location as me. All that is required for people to consume such information is sight. Much fewer people can see other expressions of taste, say my home décor or book collection, and do so much less frequently. These expressions are much more difficult to distribute to a large amount of people (as I do not carry them around with me).
On the other hand, there is significant friction to distributing ‘buying’ and ‘discovering’ in the physical world. When we discover and buy clothing offline, we do so in a store. We sift through racks and swipe a credit card and are handed a shopping bag with our bought items. Unlike ‘wearing’, there is no universal behavior of displaying our buying history or discovery history. We do not walk around with receipts plastered to our foreheads.
Indeed, these expressions of taste occur during discrete moments in significantly smaller social settings. More importantly, such information cannot easily be consumed via sight.
Instead, one must discuss what they have recently bought and discovered. Talking, or audio information, requires consistent energy, thus comes with a variable, marginal cost to produce and distribute. Wearing, on the other hand, is a fixed cost that we incur at the moment of getting dressed (production cost) and which has zero marginal cost to distribute.
Moreover, as discussed in Social Retail: Immersion & Serendipity, we tend to limit expressing audio information (talking) to people we we know, whereas the visual information expressed in ‘wearing’ can be consumed by anyone near us.
This severely limits the distribution of ‘what we buy’ and ‘what we discover’ as expressions of taste.
Thus, ‘wearing’ is the path of least resistance to accumulate social capital in the physical world. What we wear demonstrates the proof of work that goes into the process of discovering and buying clothing according to one’s taste, which we can share with zero marginal cost.
This provides us with the most efficient path to maximize the social capital we attain through expressing our taste through clothing.
But we do not “wear” clothing online.
So how do we express our fashion taste online?
The User Wears no Clothes
‘Discovering’ is the process by which we employ, and continuously nurture and improve, our taste to determine what to buy. In the physical world, what we buy determines what we wear.
But this is not true in the digital world, as we do not wear clothing online.
This might seem obvious, but it is, in my opinion, a critical observation. In the digital world, we do not have a cheap way to produce behavior that frictionlessly shares one’s fashion taste to the world around them.
What does this mean for our identity and how we create a digital self? How does this impact our self-esteem and relationship with other people?
Our identity is incomplete. Our digital self lacks a mechanism to digitize this critical manifestation of our taste, and thus the essence of one’s identity and individuality.
Yet, many other forms of information have become universal components of our digital self that are seamlessly shared online.
Indeed, great businesses have been built atop of technological innovations, particularly via mobile, that have made previously ‘trapped’ analog information frictionless to share and digitally legible by computers.
GPS integration in mobile phones makes our location universal and frictionless to share. This bred Uber, Google Maps, Waze and a plethora of other businesses.
The integration of a mobile phone with an audio player made ‘what we are listening to’ and our music taste frictionless to share. This bred Spotify, Apple Music, and implicitly, TikTok.
Every digital space we enter, we showcase our name or a username. Professional networks like LinkedIn have made ‘where we work’ digitally defined. On social media networks, we have made ‘who our friends are’ digitally legible. Follower counts and likes created new measurements of status that make sharing ‘popularity’ frictionless.
Your address book, now saved digitally in your phone, can be digitally shared with any new app given a simple permission request.
Other examples abound.
But how do we share our fashion? How do we express our taste through clothing?
New Digital Gestures
First, let’s revisit the three components of the value chain discussed earlier. They are:
Discovering
Buying
Wearing
We do not ‘wear’ clothes online. So we create other mechanisms to try and express our taste. We do so through sharing a photo or video.
People share their fit pics in daily WDYWT (“what did you wear today”) threads with strangers in Reddit communities like r/malefashionadvice (5.6M members), r/femalefashionadvice (3.8M members) and hauls in threads in r/thriftstorehauls (2.6M members).
Countless examples of such behavior exist in Discord channels as well. Additionally, many people also commonly share their fits and fashion style with friends in closed group chats, and often, simply save it for themselves in personal folders to keep track of their favorite outfits, brands and stores.
However, unlike ‘wearing’ clothing in the physical world, there exists a stigma on existing social networks that prevents many people from doing this behavior. It is perceived as cringe.
In addition, there is no single-player utility to sharing a photo or video of ‘what you are wearing’. In the physical world, clothing provides us with both utility (protecting us from the elements) and social capital (self-expression), whereas here this action simply offers social capital.
This single-player utility subsidizes the perceived fixed cost of wearing (i.e. getting dressed) to make it incredibly cheap to do. But the same is not true of taking a photo or video. It takes time and energy, and while such proof of work is important to underpinning a social action with value, the existence of a stigma makes this behavior prohibitive to many.
Thus, individuals operate in anonymous corners of the Internet like Reddit and Discord. As such, this expression is limited to a subset of people who either have a financial incentive (affiliate and influencer marketing) or who seek out anonymity (Reddit and Discord) and thus sacrifice maximizing status.
Yet, people are willing new digital actions and places into existence for the sole purpose of expressing their taste through clothing.
The Rise of Resale, Vintage & Thrift
Let’s ask another question: why is resale, vintage & thrift so popular among Gen Z and Millennials? These two groups account for nearly two-thirds of incremental secondhand spend. In Gen Z closets, 2 in 5 items were bought secondhand.
I argue that environmental concerns are overstated drivers. The popularity of fast-fashion behemoths like SHEIN and Temu contradict such a premise.
How do you explain this paradox? What unites SHEIN, vintage, resale and thrift is the desire for consumers to ‘hunt’ an ever growing inventory of items to find unique clothes that align with their style and taste. Both offer value and abundant selection, thus consumers can can discover, buy and then wear unique clothing that offers the most efficient path to maximizing social capital.
SHEIN produces as many as 10,000 new styles per day, while Zara adds 500 every week. Whereas Prada, Gucci and other designer brands release a finite collection each season, the secondhand discovery of these brands (both online and offline) offers abundant supply that one can leverage their taste to prune through process of discovery and determine what to buy.
Consumers, I posit, care most about buying clothing that are unique and hard to discover. Both examples mean that consumers can flex their taste during discovery.
Moreover, both are known to be cheap, thus enabling consumers to purchase more units of clothing with a finite budget, which allows them to produce more expressions of taste through wearing.
As a result, uber-fast fashion companies like SHEIN and the categories of vintage, resale, and thrift accomplish similar goals — they offer the most efficient path to maximizing social capital.
Resale and vintage offers the ability to buy scarce clothing, which demonstrate the hunt and work of the discovering process of finding that item. Given its velocity and low price points, SHEIN offers consumers the ability to discover and buy more unique pieces akin to their taste. Thus, this enables more expressions of taste through wearing.
What this reveals is that consumers, especially younger consumers, are more and more depending on fashion to provide them with status, social capital and self-esteem. So far, this largely materializes in the physical domain. Yet, these demographics spend more and more time online. As evident by the various subreddits and discord channels, they yearn for a similar digital space that allows them gain social capital through the expression of taste through clothing.
Closing: Status is changing
Status has shifted quietly in the background of our social fabric over the past couple of decades. Propelled by a new era, the digital era, our status system has moved past valuing the consumption and more towards the ability to materialize the intangibility of our ‘taste’ through creative consumption.
Taste has propelled a number of networks in other verticals. On Pinterest, users discover aesthetical photos and ‘pin’ those that they find interesting to a personal board. This digital action, pinning, is an expression of each users’ taste. Their taste decides what they ultimately discover and then what they pin. Users gain value from the process of discovering cool photos as it helps them nurture their taste (utility), and seek to gain status from other users who deem them to have good taste by sharing their boards publicly (social capital).
This status materializes into a like or follow, which makes the social capital in the digital arena much more tangible.
This digital gesture, pinning, is an expression of each users taste and replaces the need for ‘transacting’ and owning something in order to display it. In the physical world, one would need to purchase a photograph in order to display it and express their taste.
Other networks abound. Beli is a network where users express their taste through food and Letterboxd is a network where users express their taste through film.
Both networks are rooted in the digital gesture of rating. Rating allows the users to express their taste, and in exchange for organizing the information of restaurant and movie quality in a way that improves discovery and note-keeping (utility), the networks share such ratings to their friends, thus allowing users to gain status from being seen (social capital). Indeed, where one eats and what one watches had significantly less distribution in the analog, and thus the promise of frictionless digital distribution offers a compelling value proportion for people hoping to gain status and esteem for their taste.
But unlike Pinterest, where the core action of pinning is tied to discovering, rating is inherently tied to buying. Rating is a feature that expresses one’s opinion of a consumption experience. Thus, rating naturally occurs subsequent to consuming a service or product. Rating is proof of work that one bought a product or service and offers a new way to express this behavior in a manner that invokes one’s taste.
Rating, as opposed to pinning and other discovering gestures, requires more work and has a higher cost, which creates more scarcity, and thus makes it more valuable as a expression of taste. Rating a movie comes with the opportunity cost (time) of watching the movie and the financial cost of purchasing it, and rating a restaurant comes with the financial cost of purchasing the meal and opportunity cost of the experience (time). As opposed to a wish list, a gesture of discovery, this better expresses one’s taste and earns them more status since it is harder, and more costly, to produce.
Eugene Wei observes this as well:
If it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it. It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.
Thus, rating is more akin to creating a digital behavior that makes ‘what you bought’ digitally legible.
Good taste is higher status than a good job. Wearing a vintage, second-hand designer piece is higher status than purchasing a ready-to-wear straight off the runway. Fashion has become much more a status game where tokens are granted to those who demonstrate proof of work rather than proof of wealth.
All of this is driven by the growing importance of fashion in a quest for status, and consumers searching for new digital expressions to share this.
As status seeking monkeys, the most efficient path to maximizing social capital is through fashion. This requires expressing our taste through wearing clothing, which we all do. Given those conditions, what we decide to wear is ultimately the main factor that differentiates our taste. The goal thus becomes how to effectively discover and buy unique clothing that you can wear to express your taste and maximize status and social capital, allowing one to create the most efficient path to accumulating social capital in the physical world (through wearing) and attain new social capital through this new digital behavior that helps them do so.
Interesting post and learned new things from it , agree with everything you said