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We used to describe a room as serene, rustic or eclectic. Now it’s ‘Japandi’, ‘cottage-core’ or – god help us – ‘grandmillennial’. We used to say we bought a chair. Now, we ‘sourced’ it. Somewhere along the way, the language we use to talk about interiors stopped helping us get to grips with what we like and started flattening everything into a shorthand that is more about performing taste than understanding it.
As co-founder of Diet Prada, I’ve spent the past decade immersed in the digital machine that drives taste – celebrating it, interrogating it and, yes, at times tapping into the rhythms of clickbait to cut through the digital noise. But maybe that’s why I feel the urgent need to pause and question it. I’ve watched trends and news cycles be born and die in hours, and have seen how easily a single image, keyword or brand can crystallise into a viral ‘moment’ – and just as quickly calcify into cliché.
So when I found myself pulled into the orbit of the interiors industry – as a collector, a home owner and, just recently, someone whose space has featured online in this very title – I was struck not by how different it was from the fashion world but how eerily similar. Interior and product design, as is the case in many other industries, is now being re-engineered to serve the algorithm. Words that once described specific movements or deeply rooted traditions are now used to sell a vibe. To name something is to commodify it; and once it has a name, it has a hashtag, and once it has a hashtag, it has a shelf life.
We’ve entered what I’d call the era of ‘keyword-ification’. It’s not enough for a room to feel elegant – it has to be ‘old money’. A kitchen isn’t just a shade of beige – it’s ‘quiet luxury’. Even the way we talk about the process of decorating our own spaces has been repackaged to signal a kind of insider fluency, to inflate the process. Sure, admitting you clicked ‘add to cart’ on Etsy isn’t as romantic as saying you ‘sourced’ that ‘vintage objet’ from some niche, unknown dealer. But like so much of this aesthetic language, these keywords are now overused to the point of being devoid of all meaning.
It’s tempting to think this is just what taste is like now: fast, fluid, memeable. But there’s a semantic cost to this kind of speed. When you label something too hastily or broadly, you risk stripping it of its origin. The word ‘chinoiserie’, for instance, has become a stand-in for anything vaguely Asian, when historically it referred to objects made for Western tastes, often by European hands, sometimes by Asian artisans under colonial control. Wabi-sabi gets boiled down to a few dried branches in a pinch pot vase, divorced from its roots in a philosophy celebrating transience, humility and imperfection. Even ‘Mid-century’ encompasses a dizzying number of unrelated silhouettes from five decades, because it’s an easier sell to people who may not know the specifics but recognise the label as a shortcut to good taste.
This flattening is not new. The industrialisation of taste has been happening for centuries. The Grand Tour codified exoticism, turning complex cultures into drawing-room status symbols. The Victorians sold taste by catalogue. The Mid-century Modern boom was driven by magazines and marketing campaigns that sold everything from Eames chairs to electric mixers, with a side of optimism along with it. It was design as a vehicle for postwar progress, domestic reinvention and a new era of more democratic access to good taste. But what’s different now is the sheer pace, and the discursive emptiness that comes from it. Trends no longer evolve, they drop. They’re consumed, hashtagged, DIY’d and dumped before they’ve had a chance to acquire meaning.
And we aren’t just flattening language – we’re burning through the objects themselves. Those DIY expanding foam mirrors? Probably busily off-gassing VOCs, destined to be piled in shipping containers and sent off to become another country’s problem. When ‘taste’ is algorithmic, even great design becomes disposable. Mario Bellini’s ‘Camaleonda’ sofa – once a triumph of 1970s modularity – got TikTok’d into oblivion. A piece that should last decades became passé in two years, sacrificed to the cycle of content and clout.
This isn’t a purist or elitist lament, nor is it about being ‘correct’ – it’s a call to allow room for proper curiosity and nuance. I can’t claim to be immune myself to clickbait-induced brain fog. Even with a decent grasp of design history, I still catch myself wondering if my own home reads a little ‘grandma’ and, often, whether my brain is being rewired for the worse.
In today’s digital landscape, taste isn’t something we cultivate through studying art, visiting museums, reading about design history or in whatever way absorbing our cultural context. Instead, we develop it by means of Pinterest moodboards, low-lift listicles and SEO-oriented fluff pieces. And as the piles of discarded cream bouclé and burned-out buzzwords grow, we’re left to wonder: looking past all of the tags and labels – do we even know what we like any more?
If you would like to submit an opinion on the issues raised in this article to be considered for publication online, email us a letter of up to 250 words at roomfordebate@worldofinteriors.co.uk
