GTWJ BLOG · SEPTEMBER 2026
If Everyone Has It,
Do You Still Want It?
The uncomfortable relationship between taste, exclusivity and access.
A Question About Taste
I was reading a New York Post piece recently and came across an argument that immediately made me stop.
The broader complaint was about influencers entering spaces and experiences that had once felt more private, more exclusive and more insulated from mass visibility.
And my first reaction was fairly simple: what a strange way to think about something you supposedly enjoy.
But the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in whether one particular person was right or wrong. The more interesting question was underneath it.
Can another person actually ruin something you genuinely like?
Before We Go Further
There Is an Important Distinction Here.
This is not an argument that every criticism of influencer culture, increased access or the changing atmosphere of certain spaces is unreasonable.
The conversation that is around the US Open, and there is a completely separate issue here that I do think matters: how people behave once they enter a shared space.
If somebody is filming TikToks, staging photographs, making excessive noise, blocking another person's view or otherwise preventing people around them from enjoying an experience they also paid to attend, I don't think the interesting question is whether they are an influencer, wealthy, famous or completely unknown. The problem is the behavior.
Access to a space does not give anyone permission to behave as though everyone else in that space has become the background of their content. Other people are entitled to watch the match, eat their dinner, visit the exhibition, sit in the hotel or simply experience the moment without being unwilling participants in somebody else's production.
I find that kind of entitlement disrespectful, and it is not what I am questioning in this essay.
There is also nothing strange about deciding that you personally no longer enjoy a particular place because its atmosphere has genuinely changed. If somewhere becomes louder, more crowded, more performative or simply less enjoyable to you, then the experience itself has changed. You are responding to a real difference in the thing you are experiencing.
What interests me here is something much narrower and, I think, psychologically more revealing: what happens when nothing about the thing you supposedly loved has changed except who else is now allowed to have it?
There is a difference between losing enjoyment because an experience has genuinely changed and losing desire because exclusivity has.
The object itself can remain exactly the same while everything surrounding its meaning changes.
“Do I love this because it belongs to me — or because it doesn't belong to you?”
01 · What Exactly Changed?
The Bag Didn't Change. So Why Did Your Desire?
Imagine that you buy a bag because you believe it is beautifully designed. You love the leather. You love the proportions. You love the handle. You love the way it sits against your coat. You love carrying it.
Nothing about those qualities disappears because somebody else buys the same bag.
The leather has not changed. The construction has not changed. The color has not changed. Your coat has not changed. Your closet has not changed. The bag has not suddenly become less useful to your life.
And yet sometimes desire disappears anyway.
Which means something else must have changed.
An object can be desirable because of its material, shape, usefulness, craftsmanship, memory or beauty. It can also be desirable because of the social distance surrounding it. Those forms of desire are not identical.
02 · There Are Two Different Experiences
Overexposure Is Not the Same as Lost Exclusivity
This is where I think the conversation becomes more nuanced, because I absolutely understand seeing something repeatedly and eventually liking it less.
I have experienced that myself.
Sometimes an item appears and initially feels exciting because we have only seen one version of it. One campaign. One runway look. One beautifully styled photograph.
Then it becomes popular.
Suddenly we see it with jeans, skirts, shorts, eveningwear, flat shoes, boots and coats. We see it professionally photographed and badly photographed. We see it on different bodies, in different colors, in daylight, in restaurants, at airports and on the street.
And sometimes all of that exposure teaches us something.
Maybe you didn't love the object. Maybe you loved the first image of the object.
The Important Distinction
Repeated Exposure
You see the object in more contexts and gain more information about it. That information changes your judgment of the design itself.
Lost Exclusivity
Your opinion of the object changes primarily because people you did not expect, or did not want, now have access to it too.
03 · What Were You Buying?
Maybe Part of the Product Was Distance
Fashion objects do not exist outside society.
They communicate. They can signal money, knowledge, belonging, profession, subculture, taste, aspiration, insider status or simply familiarity with a particular world.
Luxury in particular has always had a complicated relationship with access.
Sometimes what is being purchased is not only leather, silk, gold, tailoring or craftsmanship. It is also the feeling that entry into this world is restricted.
Price can create that feeling. Scarcity can create it. Waiting lists can create it. Private boutiques can create it. Knowledge can create it. Limited production can create it. Even the social group traditionally associated with an object can create it.
And if that distance was an important part of the pleasure, widespread visibility can feel like a loss even when the physical object has lost nothing.
“If another person's access to an object can destroy your desire for it, what exactly were you desiring in the first place?”
04 · Negative Influence Is Still Influence
The Person You Don't Want to Look Like Can Still Control Your Taste
We usually think about influence in one direction.
You see somebody wearing something. You like it. You want it. They influenced you.
But influence can work in reverse.
You see somebody wearing something. You dislike what that person represents. You no longer want to be associated with the object. You stop wearing it.
That is still influence.
Rejecting what everybody likes is not automatically more independent than liking what everybody likes.
05 · The Fragility of Distinction
What Happens When Individuality Requires Everybody Else to Stay Behind?
There is something unstable about building identity entirely through distinction.
If the value of your taste depends on other people not having what you have, then other people hold tremendous power over your taste.
Someone discovers your designer, so you need another designer.
Someone buys your bag, so you need another bag.
Someone starts visiting the restaurant you love, so you need a new restaurant.
Someone enters the space you considered yours, and suddenly the space feels contaminated.
It can look like independence from the outside. But psychologically it can become a life spent reacting to everyone else.
Some objects become more personal with time precisely because their meaning moves away from public novelty and toward private association.
06 · Timelessness
What Does It Mean for Something to Survive Popularity?
I do think this question becomes particularly interesting with the things we call timeless.
“Timeless” is one of the most overused words in fashion, and I don't think it means that an object exists completely outside trends. Almost nothing does.
A timeless object can become fashionable again. It can become unfashionable. It can be rediscovered. It can become enormously visible. It can disappear for a decade and return.
What gives it endurance is usually something deeper than novelty: proportion, usefulness, construction, material, adaptability, cultural history or a very successful design idea.
If popularity can erase beauty for you, was beauty ever the thing you were responding to?
The Ordinary Test
Some of fashion's most enduring garments have survived precisely because millions of people have worn them. Familiarity did not destroy the white shirt. It revealed how many different lives one design could enter.
07 · Novelty Can Disappear
Changing Your Mind Doesn't Mean Your Taste Was Fake
I also don't want to turn this into a purity test.
If you liked something last year and dislike it now, that does not automatically mean you only wanted status.
Taste changes because we change.
Sometimes repeated exposure removes novelty. Sometimes seeing an object in more situations reveals that its proportions are less appealing than we first thought. Sometimes a trend becomes so visually dominant that we simply become tired of looking at it.
That is different from disliking an object because somebody you consider less sophisticated can now buy it too.
The first experience is about the object becoming more familiar. The second is about the object's social meaning becoming less exclusive.
Ask Yourself
What exactly did repetition change?
Did seeing the object repeatedly teach you something new about the design?
Did you discover that you only liked one particular styling of it?
Did the novelty simply wear off?
Or are you uncomfortable because the object no longer tells the world that you belong to a smaller group?
Those answers can sound similar from the outside. They reveal very different relationships with taste.
08 · Luxury and Access
Do You Want the Beautiful Thing — or Do You Want the Beautiful Thing to Be Difficult for Other People to Have?
This is where luxury makes the question particularly uncomfortable.
There is nothing inherently wrong with rarity.
A material may genuinely be scarce. A technique may require extraordinary skill. Production may necessarily be limited. A vintage object may be difficult to replace. A piece may be special precisely because very few examples exist.
Rarity can be meaningful.
But rarity becomes something else when another person's acquisition feels like your loss.
They did not take your object. They changed your position relative to it.
09 · The Most Uncomfortable Part
Maybe What Disappeared Was Not Luxury. Maybe It Was Superiority.
When someone says that something no longer feels luxurious because too many people can access it, we should be careful about what is actually being described.
They may not be talking about craftsmanship.
They may not be talking about service.
They may not even be talking about quality.
What they may mean is: I no longer feel as different from everyone else when I own this.
That feeling is real. But calling it luxury can disguise what is actually a desire for distinction.
“If you need everyone else to remain outside your aesthetic world for your aesthetic world to feel valuable, how personal is that taste really?”
10 · The Harder Test of Taste
Can You Still Love It When It Stops Proving Something?
We often think having good taste means resisting whatever everybody else likes.
I don't think that is necessarily true.
Sometimes good judgment will lead you toward something popular because it is genuinely good. Sometimes it will lead you away from something popular because it does not work for you. Sometimes it will lead you toward something obscure. Sometimes it will lead you toward something completely ordinary.
The important question is whether you understand why.
Taste becomes more personal when popularity and unpopularity stop functioning as instructions.
My Own Answer
I Don't Think Someone Else Can Kill Something I Genuinely Love
There are absolutely things I have become less interested in after seeing them everywhere.
But when that happens, it is usually because seeing the item repeatedly gave me a fuller picture of it. I saw more combinations. More angles. More contexts. More versions of the same idea.
And sometimes I realized that the thing I initially responded to was novelty, a specific styling moment or the excitement of something newly entering fashion.
But with the objects I genuinely consider enduring — the things whose proportions I love, whose function makes sense in my life, whose material I enjoy and which feel genuinely right for me — somebody else's access does not make those qualities disappear.
And I think I would find it more uncomfortable to realize that I stopped liking something simply because another person was now allowed to like it too.
Because at that point, my taste would not be protecting me from other people's influence. It would be completely organized around it.
Final Thought
Maybe Taste Is Tested After the Exclusivity Disappears.
It is easy to feel attached to something when owning it makes us feel early, rare, informed or separate.
The more revealing moment may come later.
When the waiting list disappears. When the designer becomes famous. When the bag becomes recognizable. When the thing you quietly loved suddenly appears everywhere.
You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to become tired of it. You are allowed to realize you never loved it as much as you thought.
But it is worth asking what changed.
Perhaps one of the clearest tests of personal taste is not whether you can resist wanting what everybody else wants. It is whether you can continue loving something when everybody else is allowed to love it too.
GTWJ Principle
Your taste should be able to survive someone else's access.
Fashion · Ideas · Identity
0 comments