The rise of social media ‘tasteslop’ — and how to avoid it

Clockwise from left: tasteslop favourites — Butter by Asako Yuzuki; a skinny-neck kettle; Maison Margiela’s Tabi shoes

From clothes to interiors, the internet has created good taste as defined by the algorithm. The trend forecaster Emily Segal tells us how to step away

by Phoebe Luckhurst

When we’re all chronically online, following the same micro trends, sharing the same book recommendations and tagging the same restaurants on our Instagram, what does it mean today to have good taste? It’s a question that has sparked debate recently after the trend forecaster and founder of the strategy firm Nemesis Global, Emily Segal, coined the term “tasteslop”, which speaks to the sort of slick, recycled modern visuals that we think are cool but feel strangely empty of human idiosyncrasies. It is beautiful blandness, an empty aestheticism, much of it generated by AI platforms such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT and replicated by the algorithm.

“Tasteslop is slop made out of things considered tasteful,” Segal says. “It comes in two flavours: either AI/algorithmically generated content that deploys recognisable taste markers — a brand mood board featuring a designer suitcase, a skinny-neck kettle, a Dieter Rams book — or tasteful things deployed in service of slop, like a curated influencer dinner for a tech company. The key is that the visible signs of taste have been extracted from their original social context and redeployed generically.”

After Segal coined the term it went viral. In a Nemesis Substack post she pinpointed a dinner party at a New York restaurant considered to be classy and slender-spouted kettles as slop, and explained why Jennifer Lawrence’s style is too (“she looks more like a shopper/demographic and less like an individual figure”, Segal wrote). Once you see it …

Birkenstock clogs; Jennifer Lawrence wearing The Row

So how can a wannabe individualist wade through the slop? Social media, algorithms and AI work by homogenising and recycling, like a labyrinthine hall of trick mirrors that leaves you feeling dizzy and anaesthetised. This is all compounded by Pinterest, TikTok and Instagram, which coin trend cycles at a rate of knots, all of which can be shoppable on Asos by the end of the week.

Trends don’t always throw up markers of “taste” exactly — but they do contribute to the sense of general sloppiness by creating uniforms. At festivals up and down the country, troupes of girls in boho white skirts and knee-high biker boots slurp spicy margaritas. In parts of Peckham and Hackney in London, you can virtually hear the clomp of Birkenstock clogs, the tread of a Salomon trainer, the swish of Adidas Trefoil shorts on the wind.

“The algorithm is so powerful, it can be really difficult to use it in a way that doesn’t force you into echo chambers,” says Alice Crossley, a strategic foresight analyst at the trend forecaster the Future Laboratory. Succumbing to slop is not just a weakness of Gen Z (or ageing millennials fighting against the dying of the light). “I saw a video of an Olivia Dean concert where every single person was wearing polka dots — mums down to kids,” Crossley says.

Obviously there is safety in the herd too. “We want to feel belonging, so we’re doing it through these shared items,” says Ione Gamble, editor of Polyester and of the essay collection The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste. “But really it’s only serving the people selling those items, the algorithms feeding us that content, the influencers who get paid to post.”

The trend forecaster Emily Segal

The big question is whether anything that starts out as a signifier of good taste is destined inevitably for the slop pile. “Not destined, but vulnerable,” Segal says. “The more explicit and widely circulated a taste signal becomes, the more it loses its esoteric quality. That’s always been true. I own a Togo couch and multiple pairs of Maison Margiela Tabis, and I’ll say plainly that both feel definitively obvious and somewhat vulgar at this point, precisely because they’ve been so heavily consecrated as expensive, high-design items.”

For Segal, good taste “has three components: discernment — the ability to make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another; pattern recognition — knowing art history or meme culture well enough to sense when something new is rhyming with or contradicting the past, plus an intuition that lets you be early; and idiosyncrasy, a personal, contextual relevance that makes taste meaningful and hard to clone.”

Think of someone such as Chloë Sevigny — a true original, someone steeped in fashion and cultural lore, with strong opinions about what she likes, who is much imitated but never matched. Gamble explains that, “Someone who has good taste is someone who has the ability to defy the pressures we feel to have the right bag, right shoes, right colour on your wall.”

Original tastemakers Sienna Miller, Alexa Chung and Chloë Sevigny

It might feel contradictory to suggest a playbook for cultivating good taste — erm, isn’t that just tasteslop? — but there are ways to drag yourself out of the matrix. “I think one of the really interesting ways young people are navigating this is second-hand fashion,” Crossley says. “When you go into a charity shop, you might have an idea based on a Pinterest outfit, but you’re not going to find the specific product. It forces you to be a bit more creative and maybe dress yourself, rather than dress an image of what you’d like to look like based on an influencer.”

Gamble suggests asking, do I actually like that or do I want it because everyone else has it? — “It feels so juvenile to even have to say that as a grown adult woman,” she says — and reading, thinking, critiquing, discussing. “We’re lulled into always having this ambivalent reaction to the world around us. I think training yourself back into having strong feelings will help you develop your taste a lot.”

To get a brain mired in slop stupor ticking over once more, ditch the screens. “We’re seeing people deleting Pinterest, deleting Instagram, immersing themselves in cultural activities,” Crossley says. “Exposure to the arts is the only antidote to this tasteslop, having critical or creative pursuits that help them feel human still.” As is trusting your gut, not the machine’s. “AI doesn’t have that feeling, when you see something, of, oh God, I love that,” Crossley says. “It’s just based on your intuition — emotional taste rather than social media taste.”

Despite observing the tsunami of tasteslop on the horizon, Segal is optimistic. “New forms of esotericism, which is essential to truly good taste, can spring up at any moment,” she says. “It just takes a couple of sharp, observant people to create it. AI is very good at identifying rote taste tokens and very bad at knowing when those markers have lost meaning or what would need to replace them for something to feel genuinely fresh. That gap is where it’s possible for good taste to break through.”