The designer Vera Wang once said that taste is when a brand resists market dynamics.
That is the cleanest definition of taste I have encountered.
The market always pulls toward the middle. More accessible. More palatable. Easier to sell to more people. The market is not malicious. It is just a reflection of aggregate preference, and aggregate preference trends toward the least friction.
A brand with taste looks at that pull and says no.
Supreme could have scaled. They chose not to. The scarcity is not a supply chain problem. It is the product. The queue is the message. Bottega Veneta deleted their Instagram at the height of its cultural relevance, when every brand was desperately chasing algorithmic reach. They did not need the reach. The absence was the statement.
A chef who keeps a dish on the menu that nobody orders, because it represents what the restaurant actually believes, is making the same move. These decisions look irrational from outside. They leave money on the table. They resist the obvious move.
That resistance is exactly what makes them worth paying attention to.
Here is why this matters right now
AI is the most powerful market-dynamics machine ever built. It is trained on aggregate human preference at scale, across every domain. It knows what most people like, what most people write, what most people click on. It is extraordinarily good at producing the thing that will satisfy the most people adequately.
That is not a criticism. That is what it is optimised to do.
Which means anything produced by AI without editorial resistance will trend toward the middle. Not bad. Not offensive. Adequate. Optimised for approval rather than meaning.
Taste is the editorial resistance
The decision to make something worse by conventional metrics because it is more true to what you believe good looks like. The refusal to let the model's suggestion stand because it is technically correct but somehow wrong.
A company with taste uses AI and still sounds like itself. A company without taste uses AI and starts to sound like everyone else, which is the same as disappearing.
The market will always tell you what sells. Taste is knowing what to build before the market tells you to.