300(ish) Words on Bad Taste
For a while, I was living in Austin, Texas, after college stringing beads on chains for a local jewelry label. It was a company, like many companies in Austin, that traded in the aesthetics of a lifestyle brand — or Good Taste.
This began to make me feel like hurling myself against a wall, this adherence to Good Taste. I began to seek more bodacious forms of fake gold and hotter shades of pink. In other words, I became me — at least the “me” I know right now. Bad Taste was escapism from a life I didn’t know how to change.
In a bookstore last year, I found The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste by Jane and Michael Stern. Published in 1990, the Sterns documented subjects like Barbies, Tammy Faye Bakker, and the Home Shopping Network. “At its most delicious,” the Sterns write, “bad taste is impudent, and like a lot of strong comedy, it provokes anxiety because it breaks taboos.”
I could not quite articulate to the world my yearning for neon, leopard print, and Liberace homes until the Bible of Bad Taste helped me understand. It was in no small part thanks to this book that the idea for Very Famous took increasing shape in my mind. Sometimes I fear Bad Taste will jump the shark, with many an Instagram account dedicated to the aesthetic — and the current trend of Gucci maximalism.
But where there will always be trends involving wellness, all-white rooms, lots of wood, and sleek fonts, there will be some sort of rejection of that. “Good taste is conservative, traditional, minimal, sober,” the Sterns told People. “Bad taste is exuberant, excessive, impudent, sentimental.” I think Bad Taste will continue to be interesting. And I think I’ll cling to it in hopes that I’ll stay vulgar.
