The Problem With Buying Taste

Source: The Problem With Buying Taste, This Is Antwon, 14:33, uploaded 2026-08-03.

The video opens with a Rimowa suitcase. It is heavy, expensive, easy to damage, and widely treated as an object of good taste. Celebrities, fashion people, and experienced travellers have made it a familiar sign of design sense. The suitcase therefore sits close to the problem the video wants to name: the things that communicate taste can become so familiar that they start to resemble the content they were meant to distinguish themselves from.

Taste as time and judgement

The phrase “taste slop” comes from Emily Siegel’s writing about AI-generated mood boards that combine Rimowa suitcases, Dieter Rams books, and other recognised signs of good taste. The image has enough cultural information to look considered whilst offering the viewer a ready-made arrangement. Siegel’s term describes the moment when the language of taste becomes another form of mass-produced content.

The video uses Siegel’s account of taste as its working definition. Taste involves a specific judgement about why one thing is better than another, knowledge of the past joined to some intuition about what may come next, and a personal reason for caring about the thing. A car can matter because a parent drove it. Music can remain important because it accompanied a decisive moment. Personal significance gives a preference a history that an image assembled from fashionable objects does not have.

Those abilities take time. A person learns to critique something by spending time with it, learns its cultural value by entering its history, and learns what it means personally by looking back at lived experience. Wearing many jackets teaches something that looking at photographs cannot. Taste therefore has a material and historical basis. It grows through contact with things, memory, and a person’s own judgement.

The video calls taste cultural capital. Money can buy access to objects, yet it cannot compress the time needed to understand the worlds around them. The speaker sees the awkwardness when billionaires appear at fashion shows, when corporate merchandise borrows the language of independent labels, or when fast-fashion companies repeat the claims once associated with heritage luxury. These attempts seem to buy the appearance of a process that usually takes years.

The taste object

Taste has become a visible social requirement. Going analogue, replacing algorithmic feeds with simpler devices, watching old films through Letterboxd, buying vintage clothes with a story, and arranging a home around physical objects can all become ways to show distance from slop. The desire to demonstrate taste creates its own pressure. People want to signal that they recognise more than the mass audience.

The result is the taste object: an item that carries the meaning of good taste because tasteful people have used it, written about it, and shown it repeatedly. The Togo sofa, Tabi shoes, a particular kettle, a set of headphones, a lamp, a car, or a Rimowa suitcase can become so recognisable that the object communicates before its owner says anything. Its meaning has been repeated until anyone can consume it.

That repetition creates a problem. An object that is easy to recognise as tasteful is also easy to reproduce in a mood board or recommendation feed. The more an item functions as a public sign, the more easily it enters generic aspirational content. Taste and slop begin to share the same objects. “Quality slop” sounds like a joke because it joins two opposing terms, yet the video treats the joke as accurate. A person can choose a critically praised film, restaurant, or book because other people have certified it, then mistake the borrowed judgement for a personal one.

The video places this process inside social media. People know less about the creators they watch and have less control over what appears in their feeds. A taste object can give a creator instant cultural authority without a long introduction or an account of their experience. The object arrives with just enough context to feel understood. The viewer receives the signal without doing the work of finding the object, learning its history, or entering the culture from which it came.

The distinction remains important. Enthusiasts who make content about iconic clothes, restaurants, or furniture are not automatically producing slop. The same material can carry knowledge and pleasure. The risk appears when the context dissolves and a recognisable object becomes an empty prompt for aspiration.

The suitcase and its story

The speaker turns the accusation towards himself. He bought the Rimowa suitcase years before making the video and had used it often without presenting it as proof of his taste. He admits that belonging to a fashion-content community played a part in the purchase. He also has a different reason, which reaches back to a train journey when he was a student.

An older couple asked him to lift their luggage onto the rack. Their battered Rimowa cases carried dents, scratches, colours, and stickers from years of travel. The cases suggested a shared life that had accumulated around them. The image stayed with him because the suitcase seemed to promise a similar relation to time: an object that would remain through repeated journeys and acquire a story from its use.

A decade passed before he could buy one. Since then, the suitcase has appeared in discussions about overpriced products, status signals, and taste slop. Those readings do not erase the memory that led him to it. Every new dent brings the object closer to the old couple’s cases, even though the same dents may also make it look like a fashionable prop in somebody else’s feed.

The video leaves the judgement open. The suitcase can carry a personal association and function as a public taste signal at the same time. The speaker may be defending a meaningful purchase, or he may be rationalising an expensive object whose cultural meaning has changed. The uncertainty is part of the point. Personal experience gives an object value, while shared images keep changing the social meaning around it.

Taste as a personal language

The video’s closing claim gives taste a narrower and more useful role. Taste does not decide whether an object is good or bad in isolation. It expresses how an object resonates with a person through knowledge, enthusiasm, memory, and the culture in which that person encountered it. Those relations can involve niche knowledge or an experience that other people cannot see. They can also attach to things that conventional taste treats as lowbrow.

The speaker recommends analysing what one likes before reaching for the object that has already been certified as tasteful. Genuine pleasure in something unfashionable, together with the ability to explain that pleasure, interests him more than arranging a self around recognised signs. Trends can introduce useful objects, yet personal judgement decides whether they deserve a place in a life.

The source’s argument remains a reflection on fashion, media, and personal preference rather than a study of taste or recommendation systems. Its account of taste slop comes from Siegel’s essay, and its claims about cultural capital, social feeds, and the pressure to appear tasteful belong to the speaker’s interpretation. The sponsored clothing-brand segment has been left out because it does not develop the argument.

Further reading / references

• Emily Siegel, “tasteslop”, the Substack post that supplies the term and the AI-generated mood-board example discussed in the video.