Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes.

If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants.

So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.

And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste".

Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful".

Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.

It's all peer pressure, all social status.

Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it.

Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why.

But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.”

Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.

I don't disagree. Taste is dynamic. One distinction I'm making is that there are tastemakers and tastetakers. And they are not the same.

The dynamism can come in different ways as well. For example, the tastemaker can change their mind. Or, gen pop can change who they look up to as arbiters of taste.

There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.

I had taste before it was cool!

> It's all peer pressure, all social status.

You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.

Horrid is just what dramatic people say. Old styles were and are still great. You have to see things for what they were to really understand them. Anything with a good amount of thought put into it is great no matter the time or place. This is why fashions are cyclical: it was always a good idea just one that became too familiar at one point and had to be forgotten and rediscovered. A sort of wanderlust situation.

No. Tastes are subjective; beauty is objective. This is what permits us to say whether someone has good or bad taste. If it were purely subjective, then it would be impossible to make these claims. They would be nothing more than expressions of power, whether by the majority or some authority.

Fads and fashions occur, sure, but they aren't always aligned with good taste. And you can have varieties of beauty (why can't two different styles both be beautiful in two different ways?). I also wouldn't exaggerate the divergence. Some of what you've written is cliche rather than history.

Unity, the true, the good, and the beautiful are but three different perspectives on being and a matter of objective reality. The discernment or subjective condition of the tastes of a person have to do with how one receives reality rather than reality itself. Reality is, after all, received according to the mode of the receiver.