A few years later, that inheritance mutated into an obsession with emo punk rock. I shuffled songs on my iPod sung by long haired teenagers with excessive eyeliner, theorising about the betrayal and the unbearable tragedy of being sixteen. I dressed in black, but didn’t necessarily adopt much else of the emo-aesthetic - a mercy for both my teenage photographs and anyone forced to look at them now.

After highschool, however, I mainly abstained from rock and its derivatives up until about last year, when I discovered Linkin Park’s new album.

It all went downhill from there.

I listened to Linkin Park on my commute into Shoreditch. While doing my food shop. On the tube. I feigned surprise when my Spotify Wrapped revealed that my most-listened-to songs of 2025 were all Linkin Park.

I’m proud to say I began 2026 with a noble new year’s resolution: to diversify my music taste beyond one single alt rock artist.

I had finall understood, after all these years of depriving myself of my true pleasures — a headbanging guitar solo, for example — that I could indulge again. Start listening to rock, in whatever form it arrived. Allow myself back into the genre, with all its leather, melodrama and emotion.

Maybe, this time, not exclusively Linkin Park.

And it was around then that my feed began recommending him: a young, charismatic, long-haired, sweat-slicked icon in leather and eyeliner. Yungblud.

This is how I became re-acquainted not just with rock music, but with its fanbase’s most enduring archetype: the rockstar.

Rock Back in The Day

The rock star figure emerged in the 1950s–1960s as a cultural hero, replacing movie stars and politicians as the central iconic figures of youth culture. It arose in the context of post‑war societies that were highly ordered, conformist, and morally restrained.

After World War II, the US and Europe rebuilt around order. Having experienced the complete opposite for over six years, social organisation helped people feel in control. Daily life became standardised through suburbia, uniform shopping centers, mass media, and national brands, where families lived in similar houses, drove the same cars, and watched the same TV.

The rockstar was the antithesis of this new normal.

Stars like Elvis, Dylan, the Stones, and later Springenstein gave young people a visible, autonomous figure who seemed to speak for their frustrations, pleasures, and ambitions, rather than for uniformity. They were often working‑class and they used music, style, and performance to signal that they were outside ‘polite society’ and connected to the street, the underground, and the counter‑culture.

The figure of the rockstar represented a way to live dangerously and freely, to challenge gender roles and sexual norms, and to assert that marginal or ordinary lives could indeed be spectacular.

Rockstars were sexy, messy, chaotic and unhinged… all the things post-war societies were trying to evade.

Rock Now

Rock music died in 2009, with critics claiming the 2010s were the first decade since the 1950s without a significant rock presence at the top of the charts. The genre was sidelined, and other emerging subcultures gained traction in the fringes of society.

As of 2026, however, things seem to be changing, and the internet is claiming a comeback. This shift is underscored by the involvement of rock’s most notorious figures: Ozzy Osbourne, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Grohl, and Roger Daltrey. In a world still defined by guitar solos and long hair, their opinions still carry weight—and they all endorse Yungblud.

This is how I started to realise that rock is back.

The Archetype of The 60s Rockstar in 2026

As Rolling Stone put it, Yungblud works so well as the old 60s rock star archetype in the 2020s because he’s resurrecting its core traits (the theatrical rebellion, hedonism, inclusivity, and a full‑blown “rock star” persona), but updating them for Gen Z, social media, and a more self‑aware, vulnerable type of masculinity.

His shows are pyrotechnic, arena‑scale, and confrontational, with fire cannons, confetti, and speeches. He dresses in smeared eyeliner, tight pants, long hair, and campy, glam‑punk uniforms, directly echoing the visual code of 70s–80s rock and glam. He openly talks about chaos, drugs, late nights, and emotional wreckage, and videos and interviews frame him as a “Tasmanian devil of pop‑rock” who lives on the edge. It’s an embodiment of vintage rock: the idea that the star is dangerous, wild, and out of control, but also miraculously creative because of it.

In 2026, the rock star image is a fitting match for a cultural moment that is unequivocally anti‑digital. Contemporary figures who revive that image carry the classic visual code of 70s–80s rock and glam, but repurpose it for a new set of values. The old package of rebellion and hedonism is now being used to talk about mental health, gender, and youth anger, not just chaos and excess. At festivals and arena tours in 2026, these shows are framed as spaces where people can “bring your anger and leave it,”.

It works. It keeps the drama and danger of the old archetype while aligning it with a generation that wants catharsis, connection, and the sense that emotions are legitimate and collective.

Rock and Design

Rock aligns closely with an anti‑standardisation mentality that is surfacing in the fringes as AI optimises everything around us. In design, this is expressed through deliberate messiness, excess, dense pattern, and saturated colour… In a way, it’s an insistence that something was made by a person, not a model.

We’re seeing it in typography, with a return to what designers call “chicken scratch”: the shaky, hand‑drawn linework and imperfect letterforms behind brands like Jolene Bakery in London. These marks look temporary, informal, and human, sharply rejecting the clean, vector‑perfect fonts that dominate algorithmic design systems.

Similarly, the Yale School of Art website (a pretty cool crowd‑editable and intentionally chaotic website) shows that rock’s collaborative, messy nature is still in full swing. The site mixes clashing typefaces, overlapping elements, and irregular grids, creating a living document that feels like a punk zine from the 80s.

In photography, we’re seeing it in the “garage aesthetic”: grainy, untidy visuals with torn edges, scribbles, and collage‑like layers. These images are framed as a reaction against the sterile, hyper‑polished outputs of AI tools and corporate templates. It’s the same anti‑standardisation mentality that rock stood for in the first place: loud, imperfect, and above all: human.

Things I Find Rock and Roll

It wouldn’t be a Taste Archive piece if I didn’t highlight a couple of pieces I think fit into the trend I’m analysing.

So here goes:

Polka-dots have come a long way, in my eyes at least, from their long-held association with the prim, lacquered femininity of the 1950s housewife.

I know I’m not the only one with the sudden interest. High street shops are stocking all-things polka, the girls are getting dots in their manicures and versions of the pattern are getting plastered onto vases, tables, wallpapers and candelabra.

Whilst their aesthetic revival is interesting enough on its own, the real surprise lies in the pattern’s history itself — which, as it turns out, is far stranger than the dots would have you believe.

The History

If we look back to the middle ages, my aversion (correction: previous aversion) to polka-dots feels justifiable. Hand‑made spots on fabric are recorded in Europe from the Middle Ages, but they were visually associated with the pustules and rashes of leprosy, syphilis, smallpox and plague.

These were not, of course, the crisp, evenly spaced dots we recognise from mid‑century dresses, but irregular, hand‑worked speckles that crawled across the cloths like a rash. In a world before industrial printing and the sewing machine, you simply could not achieve the kind of regimented, mechanical polka dot that only really appears with nineteenth‑century textile technology. Visually, they were scattered, uneven “moons” and blots: hand‑dabbed circles that swelled or faded at the edges, clumping together in some places and thinning out in others.

Of course they looked like the very illnesses people feared most.

The Industrial Revolution broke that visual contagion loop. Once mechanised weaving and roller printing entered the scene, mills could place each dot with millimetre‑perfect regularity, turning what had been a rash of marks into a perfectly drilled regiment of circles.

And his new way of printing on fabric was cheap.

Before mechanised textile production, every decorative element had to be woven, embroidered, block-printed, or painted by hand. Labour was the expensive part. Once roller printing arrived, thousands of yards of fabric could be printed quickly and consistently by machines, driving costs down and making patterned textiles accessible to a much broader market.

Working‑ and lower‑middle‑class women could suddenly buy dotted calicoes and muslins off the bolt, andpeople who had never been able to afford “fashion” before, suddenly did.

Once polka-dots hit the mainstream, their connotation began to change. By the 1950s they had become what I had always associated them with: a visual shorthand for cute, wholesome, sometimes slightly coquettish womanhood in American popular culture.

Other Cultural References

Centering the polka-dots purely on American culture is, obviously, limiting. Polka dots had various other associations, such as the ‘lunares’ of Spanish flamenco dancer dresses, or their use in African traditions to signify magical potency or male virility.

Arguably, the Japanese have been using versions of the popular pattern since much longer than westerners, through techniques like shibori tie‑dye, which produce repeated small circles on cloth and appear on some traditional garments.

Current Context

I’ve never liked the phrases quiet luxury or old money. One insists that truly luxurious things should be discreet. The other is essentially a rebrand of class snobbery.

Good riddance.

As those trends lose their grip, so too does the idea that fashion must be tasteful, restrained and permanently dressed in shades of oatmeal. Back come the bows, the leopard print, the polka dots and all the other things fashion spent a decade insisting were too loud.

Polka-dots also come back with the surge on femininity (bows, lace, ballerina shoes), but do so with a reclaimed sense of empowerment. I no longer read it as representative of the 1950s oppressive womanhood, but as a reclamation of playfulness.

For all my initial attempts, the dots have been difficult to avoid. They’ve appeared on the runways of luxury fashion houses, in the wardrobes of celebrities, across TikTok manicures and, inevitably, on the shelves of Zara.

The trend has not remained confined to wardrobes. Polka-dots have also begun appearing throughout the home, from lampshades and upholstery to ceramics, wallpaper and lighting collections. After years dominated by minimalist interiors, designers have increasingly embraced the pattern as a way of introducing playfulness and visual interest without committing to full-blown maximalism.

The dot, it seems, has escaped the housewife dress and made its way onto the dining table.

Good Dots and Bad Dots

I still believe there is such a thing as good polka and bad polka.

A brown halter top with blue polka dots? Excellent. A bright red dress covered in large white ones? Usually a cause for concern.

For me, it isn’t just about colour. I firmly believe there is such a thing as a dot that’s too big. Smaller dots tend to feel more contemporary, less tethered to the pin-up silhouettes and housewife dresses that dominated the pattern’s mid-century heyday. They’re easier to wear, easier to style, and generally less likely to make you look as though you’ve wandered out of a retro-themed costume party.

Then there’s the spacing. Too much distance between the dots and the pattern starts to look accidental, as though somebody ran out of ink halfway through printing it. Pack them closer together, however, and the effect changes entirely. The pattern feels sharper, stranger, and far removed from the neat, cheerful polka dots of the 1950s.

Not all dots are created equal.

Some of my favourite finds of the polka-dot craze include this jacket by Oysho, this fit by Molly O’Halloran, or Anthropologie’s crescendo dot flatware.

Yes, door hinges.

The tiny, largely ignored piece of engineering tucked into the corner of a door, which is rarely visible… and designed to be forgotten.

I’m not, for the record, a hinge enthusiast (unless we’re talking about the app—where, incidentally, I met my partner). Without trying to sound cliché, these hinges were different. Designed with decorative swirls of metal, or creative angular joints, they showcased a ‘phenomenon’ I’m increasingly interested in: details.

For the purposes of this piece, I am going to use the words detial, flourish and care interchangeably. All three point to the small, easily missed decisions that reveal how much attention a design has been granted. When I talk about detail, flourish and care, I mean the way a hinge is articulated instead of shoved into a corner, how a seam is stitched instead of crudely sealed, how a leather knot is hand‑woven rather than slapped on like a sticker, or how a corner is resolved instead of papered over like a bad decision.

Taste Archive #03 is about that.

The History

The notion that even the smallest of elements deserve to be considered, even beautified, is not exactly avant-garde because for most of history, everyday objects were made this way by default.

From ancient Japanese joinery, to Medieval guilds or Islamic craftsmanship, utilitarian elements have been objects of beauty for centuries. Most of the time, this wasn’t an intentional choice, but a product of hand-craft. A well-made object worked, yes, but it also revealed how and why it had been made in the first place.

It’s only later, with the rise of industrial production, that this instinct was eventually challenged. As making became abstracted (split across machines, processes, and supply chains) the relationship between utility and beauty began to loosen.

One of the most vocal advocates for what we might now call “giving a damn about the small stuff,” was poet and painter William Morris. Morris insisted that the everyday was not exempt from care, and believed that usefulness did not excuse ugliness. Beauty, to mean anything at all, had to extend into the everyday.

Morris wasn’t alone in this thinking. From Ruskin’s moral defence of craft to Carlo Scarpa’s near-obsessive attention to joints and thresholds, there’s a long lineage of designers who refused to let the small things slip by unnoticed.

But this tribe of thinkers had some fierce opposition.

The Pressure Points

There isn’t one singular reason design stopped caring about the utilitarian. It’s a convergence of pressures, but to me they all point in the same, anti-capitalist direction: care doesn’t scale easily.

The first pressure was economic. As production accelerated and objects began to be made not by individuals but by systems, care became expensive, and therefore optional. What mattered instead was efficiency, clarity, repeatability — qualities a machine could deliver and a craftsman couldn’t, at least not at volume.

Then came the ideology. Where industrialisation made ornament expensive, modernism made it unfashionable. Adolf Loos famously equated ornament with crime; Le Corbusier reimagined the house as a machine for living in. Less wasn’t just cheaper anymore, it was better, more honest, more modern. A generation of designers absorbed this as gospel, and the small flourish became something closer to a moral failing.

The third shift was arguably the most consequential: the separation of design from making. Pre-industrial objects tended to have continuity between the person who designed them and the person who made them (the same hands, or at least the same workshop). Industrial production severed that chain. Design became abstract (drawings, systems, specifications), manufacturing became distributed, and the smaller decisions fell through the cracks between them.

Nobody was ignoring the hinge, exactly. It’s just that in a long enough chain, no one was looking at it either.

Current Context

We are living in the age of saturation. Saturation of content. Saturation of design. Saturation of creatives… There is a lot of everything, everywhere, and things are surprisingly easy to get hold of.

A jacket one sees on a television show is a few clicks away from being on your shopping basket thanks to the likes of image recognition. A drinks cabinet you spotted at your favourite bar downtown can be replicated in a Chinese factory, likely for a fraction of its original price. Even a sculptural lamp from a boutique hotel can now be reverse-searched, rebranded, and delivered to your door before you’ve even checked out.

But despite the fact that most things have dupes, dupes aren’t always great. They rely on speed, on shortcuts to save money. These shortcuts mean dupes of intricate jackets fail to replicate the original hand-woven seams. Or skip the fancy zipper of an original handbag.

And so brands, particularly those prone to dupification (yes, I think I might have made that word up), start introducing little details to differentiate originals from their copies, like Bottega Veneta doubling down on its intrecciato weave (a technique that’s hard to fake well), or Loewe leaning into its intricate leather knots and ballooned constructions.

The same idea can be extrapolated to any creative field. Designers are introducing more and more details to differentiate their work, make it harder to copy, and equally stand out from an overwhelming amount of competition.

I like to think care, flourish and detail are making a comeback as a lie‑detector test for everything, not a heartfelt homage to craftsmanship. In a world where most things look cloned by the time they land in your feed, the hinge is one of the first places to check: are you dealing with something that was designed, or something that was merely produced?

The difference isn’t in the Instagram shot or the resale value; it’s in the small decision to let the joint show, to treat it like a proper character in the story instead of a background extra who should really just stay out of the way.

A much better alternative is to shell pick on Pinterest.

You’re reading № 02 of The Taste Archive — a fortnightly dissection of one very specific design obsession.

And so, for the past fortnight, I have done precisely that — selecting (curating, if you will) countless shells, earrings, dresses, surfaces and textures from the comfort of my own home, until it became clear that Issue #2 had found its theme: Nacre.

The History

Nacre (or mother-of-pearl) appears in some of the earliest known examples of human ornament. From the outset, it seems to have belonged not to utility but to pleasure — to the realm of beauty, surface and refinement. It was (and still is), a material used to embellish, making it popular within societies experiencing periods of relative comfort (be it economic, political, cultural, etc). In other words, Nacre was rarely used to fight wars or survive famines, but was the material you trusted once those things were settled: for ceremony, prestige and pleasure.

Some of its most famous traders came from Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where Franciscan monks had long promoted their use for craft — establishing workshops that produced objects for pilgrimage and export worldwide. The objects themselves were things like crucifixes, nativity scenes, rosaries, and small relief carvings of biblical scenes, all made from locally sourced nacre, primarily from Red Sea and Persian Gulf shells. Pilgrims would buy them as souvenirs and proof of their journey, which gave the trade an almost built-in ‘distribution network’: every pilgrim who returned home was essentially an exporter.

Despite its ‘grandiose’ beginnings with the Egyptians, and religious artefacts, the first time that Nacre made it to the hands of a broader public was much later, through something perhaps unexpected: buttons. If you’re an avid vintage shopper or have some hand-me-downs from your grandparents, you might remember. Shell buttons became common on shirts, blouses, jackets, and other garments, before being largely replaced by plastic after World War II. After the war, the nacre look then migrated into domestic interiors, appearing in lamp shades, and decorative objects, often in imitation materials that turned the shell finish into an accessible form of home glamour.

Then, like anything that is too tied to a specific moment, Nacre and its imitations quickly flattened into 70s beach kitsch. By then, nacre had drifted from sacred object to suburban ornament — the kind of shimmer you might find on a souvenir mirror, a shell-covered lamp, or a dressing-table trinket bought in the name of glamour.

Which brings us to the present moment, where its meaning begins to shift once again.

The Current Context

The first Nacre-like thing I pinned on CRAP was back in 2024, well into the Chat GPT, Midjourney craze. By then, artificially generated image models had become widely accessible, but its ability to accurately replicate reality was still somewhat debatable. You see, AI image making works with the idea of parameters and associations. You ask AI to crate a photograph of a cat, and it draws on patterns learned from vast image datasets to infer what a cat should look like. Because of this, AI can tell that leathery, shiny snakeskin is different to the soft, long hairs of a cat’s fur. The more obvious the parameter, the easier AI can replicate it.

Let me sharpen the point through a painterly analogy, which may feel more intuitive to the creative reader. Imagine you are painting on a canvas. It is much easier to paint that red box realistically than it would be to paint it in nacre and make it resemble real life. Because nacre doesn’t have a fixed appearance—its colour and depth shift with light and angle—it resists the stable visual parameters that AI relies on to construct convincing images.

So now that we’ve established that nacre belongs to the category of materials AI struggles most to mimic—alongside others like water, chrome, and silk—we can introduce the socio-cultural factor. Much like craft resurged following the popularisation of machine-made products, creative fields have begun to place renewed value on imagery, objects, and aesthetics that sit outside the logic of AI production. As AI saturates culture with images that are infinitely reproducible, attention drifts toward what requires a bit more nuance.

The Mistake

Now is perhaps a good time to encourage you to read my Introduction article to The Taste Archive series, if you haven’t already. Up until this point, my analysis was objective. Not anymore.

I’ve come to realise that Nacre, when used in its natural form, hardly ever looks wrong. its application looks cheap (but not necessarily bad), when replicated in plastic—and possibly worse when it’s forced into forms that go against its nature.

Here are my personal rules of usage:

1. Nacre works best in restraint: when overused, it begins to look implausible, not least because shells themselves are small.

2. Nacre is not opaque, but it isn’t transparent either. It’s imitations often don’t get this balance right.

3. Real nacre has depth. Cheap versions often reduce it to a uniform pearlescent sheen, like a cosmetic finish.

The Application

Since I started paying attention, Nacre and its derivatives of shiny surfaces have started to pop up everywhere. From the pearl sheen of my friend’s nails, to shell-like purses, jewellery and furniture.

Some of my favourite finds include the Mother of Pearl Table Lamp, by Danke Galerie, the Sirena Salad Server Set by Hue Gah Home, or used as inlays for antique furniture.

If my Pinterest spiral wasn’t evidence enough, it seems nacre has also found its way back into the broader cultural lens. ROSALÍA, in her latest release, leans into pearls and high-gloss surfaces—bringing that same soft, shifting sheen into pop.

And, as history repeatedly confirms, once a pop star touches something shiny, the rest of us are rarely far behind.

Bibliography

Britannica, Mother-of-pearl.
Bethlehem University, Mother-of-Pearl: An art and a source of economic sustenance.
Terra Sancta Museum, At the school of mother-of-pearl artisans in Bethlehem.
University of Wisconsin News, Mother-of-pearl: Classic beauty and remarkable strength.
Homes & Antiques, The history of antique mother of pearl and how to start your collection.

Somewhere in storage there is a leopard print jacket, size aged-six, that predated the animal print trend cycle by approximately two decades. It was my most prized possession, one that had belonged to an older, considerably cooler cousin, worn with full conviction regardless of occasion, weather, or social consequence.

That jacket must have been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind, because for the past two weeks my Pinterest has been nothing short of a wildlife documentary. And not for the first time. Leopard print seems to resurface whenever things feel… uncertain.

And so it feels only right to open the first edition of Pinned where I began: obsessed with leopard print at the ripe age of six.

Apparently not much has changed since.

If this is the first time you’re reading me, hi, welcome! The madness that’s about to follow might make more sense if you read Pinned’s introduction first, you can find it on my Substack.

The Current Context

Trend reporters categorise leopard print as a recession indicator.

Being both loud and easy to access, leopard print sits somewhere adjacent to the so-called “lipstick effect” — the idea that when money tightens, people abandon big-ticket spending in favour of smaller, more tangible indulgences (often, quite literally, lipstick). It’s not quite the same thing, but it's the art of the affordable signal: you can't buy the lifestyle, but you can buy the suggestion of it. And so leopard print is popular during recessions not because people want comfort, but because they want to look like the recession isn’t happening to them.

Let’s zoom out for a second.

We’ve been living under “any‑day‑now” recession forecasts since around 2022, and leopard has obligingly reappeared on cue. By 2023–24 it was back on the runways – SS24 and AW24 shows at houses like Celine, Michael Kors, Dolce & Gabbana and Jacquemus pushed it hard – before it filtered down into the high street and, eventually, the leopard Sambas on everyone’s feet.

Which is just the contemporary chapter in animal print'’s much longer story.

The History

I have a good friend who studied biology at university, and whenever we inevitably find ourselves discussing life and world issues, he brings it back to our hunter-gatherer instincts, stripping every problem down to basic human nature.

So indulge me while I try to do the same.

Back in prehistoric times, the strongest member of a tribe was the hunter — the person who ensured safety against predators, who was the strongest, fiercest, and most capable, unbeatable against the most vicious of animals. They held power because, ultimately, they were the ones keeping the rest alive against threat1. Wearing their pelt after defeating them was a trophy of victory, of strength, power.

It was that same power that the Egyptians adopted several centuries later with depictions of their Goddess Seshat, carved into a corner of the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor2. Associated with writing, record-keeping, and architecture, Seshat’s dominance wasn’t of brute force like the hunter’s but of intellect. The Egyptians believed that wearing an animal’s skin transferred its power to you, and Seshat wore the leopard's pelt not to prove she could kill it, but to show she had already conquered something far harder.

This power and dominance translated across cultures and centuries, guarded jealously by those at the top. Roman emperor Honorius banned his court from wearing fur to ensure its exclusivity3. In England, Henry VIII forbade commoners from wearing certain furs or patterns4, reserving those associations for royalty only. In 13th century France, a Royal Ordinance made ermine fur exclusive to the royal family and aristocracy5.

And then the 1960s happened, and it all went to shit.

Mass production, Hollywood, and synthetic fabric brought leopard print to the high street, and with it, the collapse of everything those in power had tried to protect.

I'm not suggesting people wear leopard print today to showcase brute force, the way the hunters did. Nor that they wear it because it's something only royalty can access, the way Honorius intended. But the power it connotes bears all of that history, consciously or not — and has morphed, over centuries, into something more personal: confidence.

The Mistake

For all my affection for the print, I'm under no illusions about how quickly it can go wrong. To cross the dreaded line from bold to tacky. Animal print is loud, and like anything visually striking, push it too far and people don’t see you, they just see the print.

So here’s a few (self proclaimed) rules of usage.

The further the print strays from the original, the closer it gets to costume.

If you’re wearing leopard print but the print has been applied to sherpa, it’s going to look cheap. Same thing goes for snake skin that looks plastic-like or too shiny.

The print is loud enough on its own.

Animal print is great, but it can quickly become too much, too quickly. It looks more considered when used as a highlighting piece, not a neutral.

Cow print is black and white. Not pink, or blue, or red.

Nobody expects you to wear a real cow… but that doesn't mean the cow should be neon.

The Application

I suppose now would be a good time to point out that most of what lies in my CRAP board is not actual leopard print, but contemporary derivatives of it (Bambi fur, snake skin, horse manes…). They carry a slightly different connotation, a softer alternative to the full feline fantasy, a kind of doe‑eyed delicacy compared with the brasher cheetah and leopard crowd.

But even within this family of not‑quite‑leopard, the moods are wildly different. In the interests of simplification, I’ve started thinking of them as a kind of animal‑print Myers‑Briggs: snakeskin as sleek, luxe and a bit dangerous; cow print as Western‑coded and weirdly neutral – a graphic splurge that behaves almost like a black‑and‑white check; and zebra as fresh, edgy.

The zoo of prints apparently work best on their own, or combined with smooth, contemporary materials like steel or solid, chunky pieces of timber. Equally, I seem to favour its use when paired with neutral colours, not bold and bright ones (shocker to no-one that knows me and my love for neutrals).

I started this post thinking I was writing about a trend on a Pinterest board. I ended it realising I was writing about something a bit more poetic than that — the very human desire to borrow power from something wilder than yourself.

I suppose the jacket made more sense at six than I gave it credit for.

Despite its humble beginnings, today CRAP has become my most precious creative tool.

Every time I want to pick up my phone for doom-scrolling, I divert to CRAP instead. Over countless commutes, waiting rooms and lunch breaks, instead of succumbing to the powers of social media, I spend my time scrolling on Pinterest, saving anything and everything I find remotely interesting onto CRAP.

It turns out that feeding your brain a steady diet of beautiful nonsense is not entirely unproductive.

The usefulness of CRAP depends, in part, on its stupidity. The moment it becomes a polished archive of refined preferences, the experiment is over. Its value lies in instinct, speed, and the suspension of self-consciousness. For that reason, CRAP operates under a set of very strict rules.

The Rules

1. One must not spend longer than three seconds deciding whether something deserves to be pinned. If it made one stop scrolling, that is reason enough.

2. One must not review CRAP immediately after a pinning session. It should be revisited only once a week, or thereabouts.

3. Once something has been pinned, it cannot be un-pinned simply because one later decides against it.

4. And finally, one must pin everything one likes: fashion, art, landscapes, objects, rooms, gestures, colours. Anything, in short, can be a source of inspiration.

The Hypothesis

The more time I spent reviewing CRAP, the more it began to resemble less a random dumping ground and more a record of recurring visual fixations. Certain interests appeared obliquely: an attraction to animal print, for instance, emerging through horse manes, heavy coats and patterned rugs. At other moments, I noticed a pull towards elongated figures, or chrome furniture. Taste, it seems, has a habit of revealing itself sideways.

And slowly, CRAP has taught me to articulate my taste — if not neatly, then at least truthfully.

So every two weeks, I’ll return to the board, identify the fixation rising to the surface, and do what I always do when I want to understand something properly: write my way into it.

Because no personal research project works well without a methodology, The Taste Archive will follow a replicable pattern.

The Methodology

1. The Thing - What am I obsessed with lately?

2. The Context - What is this thing’s relationship to history, art, culture and society, and why am I suddenly interested in this?

3. The Mistake - How can the thing go wrong in design?

4. The Execution - How can the thing be applied to design correctly?

Every two weeks, then, this archive will grow.

Some entries may be about objects, some about textures, some about silhouettes or materials. Some might be fleeting obsessions, others more enduring patterns. Ultimately, all of them will begin in the same place: a moment of instinct, somewhere inside a Pinterest board called CRAP.