Once upon a time, producing anything — from products and campaigns, to websites and brand worlds — took time and money. Those constraints created natural barriers to entry, while the friction of the making process forced brands to refine their approaches to craft and develop a real point of view. But with the rise of AI, this is no longer the case.

Content that once required significant human input can now be generated more easily and cheaply, raising the risk of sameness, or what some critics have dubbed “AI slop”. And at the same time, it is reinforcing an industry pattern that was most prominent during the luxury slowdown: brands defaulting to safe, repeatable products with minimal creative risk.

“It was easier to stand out pre-AI,” says Tony Wang, founder of Office of Applied Strategy (OAS), a think tank and consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Prada, Chanel, and Cartier. “Now, the competitive pressure — both internal and external — is much higher. What do they actually want to be as a brand, especially when AI can emulate their style or even replicate their business model?”

In this environment of infinite content and increasingly derivative output, taste has emerged as both a filter and a differentiator. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important,” Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham said back in February. “When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.”

Historically, taste in a brand context is signaled through heritage and the consistency of house codes developed over time, often reinforced by creative directors returning to the archives to recontextualize these elements for the present. Today, those markers still hold weight, but are complicated by the ease with which generative AI can produce similar-looking content without any grounding in context or understanding of why those references matter.

Expressing taste in 2026 is therefore threefold: what a brand chooses to make, as the realm of possibility continues to expand; the distinctiveness and quality of those choices; and how they align with the label’s values and worldview.

As AI usage approaches ubiquity and the barriers to creation continue to fall, what does good taste look like and how can brands express it?

Taste as a tool for judgement

Notoriously difficult to define, taste sits somewhere between instinct and sensibility. “I define taste as someone’s point of view and the world they build around that,” says Isabella Burley, founder of Climax Books and former CMO of Acne Studios. “It’s incredibly personal. For me, it’s built up over decades of references and research.”

For Wang, taste operates across two layers: a cultural knowledge base, built through exposure and research, as well as the ability to act on it. “Taste is conviction,” he says. “It’s a broad way of describing judgment, discernment, and context — not just what you know, but how you apply it.”

Now, AI is rapidly democratizing that first layer. “It has rendered a lot of knowledge-based economies potentially irrelevant, or at least driven the cost of accessing that knowledge close to zero,” Wang explains. What remains — and is becoming increasingly valuable — is how that knowledge is used. “A key aspect of taste isn’t simply knowing designers or references, it’s the curation and deployment of that knowledge, which leads to the expression of taste. The conviction layer is where it gets interesting, because that’s the part AI can’t do. AI can tell you if something is likely to be a good idea, but it can’t give you the conviction to say: this is the thing, and I’m going to do it.”

That distinction becomes tangible in how brands curate. As AI reshapes retail through hyper-speed trend analysis, ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein are operating on a model driven by algorithmic responsiveness, whereby real-time consumer data is analyzed and vast volumes of product designed to meet emerging demand are almost instantly produced.

By contrast, for luxury American beauty retailer Violet Grey, curation is a product of the brand’s business model centered around disciplined restraint. Rather than stocking entire product lines, the retailer selects only a handful of standout items from each brand — for example, Dr. Barbara Sturm’s Hyaluronic Serum and Joanna Vargas’s Vitamin C Face Wash — focusing exclusively on what it considers best in class for efficacy. Each product is vetted by a committee of external experts, including aestheticians, dermatologists, makeup artists and hair professionals, and at least 80% must deem it “exceptional” before it is added to the Violet Grey mix. “It could be my sister’s brand, if it doesn’t pass the committee, it’s not going on [the shelves],” says Violet Grey CEO Sherif Guirgis. “We’re very rigorous about that. There are certainly ways the brand could make more money if we compromised on that integrity, but then what do we really have?”

“Even staying relatively small is a deliberate choice,” continues Guirgis. “We could open stores five times the size, but that would require five times the product. And we don’t believe you can maintain a best-in-class standard at that scale.” The retailer’s four US stores and single London shop-in-shop are intentionally compact, designed as “jewel box” spaces that feel more like a glamorous friend’s apartment or a walk-in vanity than a traditional retail floor, with products curated into edit-driven displays that reflect a sleek bathroom shelf. “These decisions may come with short-term trade-offs — less revenue, higher costs — but they’re central to why people love the brand. I constantly hear from customers that visiting Violet Grey is the first thing they do when they’re in LA, almost like a ritual stop. The last thing we want is to lose that sense of specialness,” she adds.

That sense of discernment — of choosing carefully rather than maximizing endlessly — also ties to a deeper idea: the ability to say no. “If taste is conviction, then it requires the capacity to disagree and back yourself,” says Wang. “AI, especially consumer-facing models, is designed to validate you and to solve your prompt. It can simulate disagreement, but fundamentally it’s built to comply. It can’t truly push back or take a stand.”

“A lot of people just accept what AI tells them, rather than developing critical thinking to evaluate why they like something, or why they don’t,” agrees Burley. Her advice? “Go to the library. Consume everything. Not just on your phone, but physically.”

Not just doing the commercially safe thing

If taste is, in part, conviction, then developing it can require going against the grain. This runs counter to how AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), are designed to operate. At their core, they are probability engines, trained to predict the most likely and most coherent responses. In a brand context, that logic tends to produce work that is safe and commercially legible, but rarely distinctive.

“Taste is when a brand resists market dynamics,” says Wang. “Everything AI does tends to be the most-optimized business decision — it’s calculated to maximize value. But simply following market dynamics isn’t an expression of taste. That’s just doing what the market would do.”

Brands that stand out tend to do the opposite, making decisions that, at least in the short term, appear to deviate from pure commercial logic. Wang points to indie production studio A24 as an example. “They’re director-friendly, deeply invested in storytelling and brand,” he says. “In the long run, that creates value — but in the short term, it’s not what a generic commercial entity would do to optimize revenue.” A24 has repeatedly backed unconventional, high-risk films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, a genre-defying project that blended sci-fi and an American Asian-fronted family drama. It was far from a “safe bet”, but the production went on to win multiple Academy Awards and become A24’s first film to cross $100 million at box office.

A willingness to embrace risk is essential. To do something unexpected comes with a lower likelihood of success, which is the kind of move AI is disincentivized to make. For brands, this risk offers an opportunity for taste to become visible. At Acne Studios, this meant deliberately stepping outside its usual casting universe. Rather than choosing someone organically aligned with the brand’s core audience, the team opted for an unexpected figure to appear in its Fall/Winter 2023 campaign.

“Kylie Jenner for Acne Studios, shot in oiled, dirty denim was about taking someone outside our world and making her an Acne Studios girl. Despite this, the denim and the image-making with [photographer] Carlijn Jacobs all felt so on-brand,” says Burley on her decision to cast the beauty mogul and reality TV star during her time at Acne Studios. The Swedish brand is traditionally known for its low-key, anti-celebrity casting. “There are ways brands can surprise, because they trust that their taste is stronger than the talent or whatever might initially feel off-brand. They make it on-brand through the way they approach it.”

Developing and demonstrating taste is something that can also be achieved through extensive research and a true understanding of what makes a brand unique. “At Climax, we’ve worked with people who feel very ‘on-taste’ for us,” Burley continues. Climax Books started out as a rare bookstore and has since evolved into a wider concept brand spanning publishing, ephemera, and collaborations across fashion and culture, usually featuring figures like musician Dev Hynes and photographer Petra Collins. “But then we did something with [American rapper] Jack Harlow. On paper, it might not make sense, but when you dig deeper, he’s an avid reader. Bringing someone from outside into your world and doing it in a way that still feels genuine creates something surprising. It makes people look twice.”

Building taste through values

To build a true brand world, taste is more than just aesthetics: it has to be anchored in a set of values that extend beyond pure commercial gain. But this is where many brands have found themselves under pressure. Amid a broader slowdown, rising prices and a perceived creative lull, consumers have begun to question what exactly they are paying for.

For Wang, redefining value is central to how brands move forward. “At OAS, we talk about being in constant investigation of what value really means,” he says. “Part of that is breaking out of traditional capitalist constructions of value as purely scale or incrementality. We help companies reframe the question: what do we actually care about? How do we move beyond traditional KPIs and build new systems of creating value?”

For instance, when Wang was approached by Ariana Grande’s makeup brand R.e.m in January 2021, he was tasked with developing a more substantive narrative and point of view, rather than relying on celebrity aspiration as the core messaging pillar. The resulting brand leaned into the “power of dreaming with imagination to craft the brand’s messaging around exploring new worlds and embracing new identities”. It also drew on the idea of the metaverse; less as a literal technological ground and more as a framing device — a way of describing the fluid boundaries between physical and digital identities, and how consumers can move between various versions of themselves across platforms. This perspective informed both R.e.m’s campaign imagery and product marketing.

In this sense, taste becomes a reflection of what a brand believes — from sustainability credentials to craftsmanship and innovation — not just what it produces. “You have to be really sure of your values — who you are, who you want to speak to — and make sure you’re hiring people who share that ethos,” says creative strategist Juliana Salazar, who has worked for Ganni, Aimé Leon Dore, Asics, and Tiffany’s. It’s a long-term play, which often means prioritizing legacy and long-term credibility over short-term commercial logic. “It’s very easy to get swept up in virality, or copy what’s working for others, but just because it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for you.”

Taken together, taste today is more than an aesthetic marker; it functions as a framework for decision-making under conditions of abundance. As AI lowers the cost of production and collapses the barriers to creating campaigns and entire brand worlds, taste can’t be expressed through visual identity alone. Instead, good taste manifests itself through restraint and discernment.