The Art of Good Taste

Reflecting on taste and how it influences my preferences on restraint, intuition, and the quiet power of elegance

Happy Sunday and welcome back to Giselle daydreams! Today, I decided to write about something slightly different from art, architecture, cinema and literature per se, but something that has always been meaningful to me that I’ve never written about. This is the art of good taste, and how good taste is omnipresent in my daydreaming musings. In the future, I'll add a few posts about taste to my usual content. However, if this is not why you subscribed to this newsletter, please skip this post and come back next week for my usual content.

Good taste is one of those elusive concepts — easy to spot, difficult to define. It resists trends, transcends price points, and reveals itself not through excess, but through restraint. It is not loud, not obvious, not algorithmically generated. It whispers rather than shouts. And when it’s real, you feel it instantly. In a world increasingly shaped by immediacy — fast fashion, fast opinions, fast likes — good taste feels almost radical. It slows down the pace. It asks you to look again. It invites a conversation with history, with craftsmanship, with subtlety. And it often begins not with what you see, but what you sense.

Taste is not style. Style is expressive. It’s personal, sometimes performative. Taste, by contrast, is about discernment — knowing what to leave out as much as what to include. It's the difference between over-decorated and intentional, between expensive and refined, between designed to impress and designed to endure.

I’ve always believed good taste reveals itself in quiet details: a perfectly tailored seam, the balance of negative space in a room, a muted colour palette punctuated by just one deliberate accent. It has less to do with owning things, and more to do with how you choose them — and how they live in your world.

Taste often reveals itself through nuance: a deliberately unadorned silhouette, an old Céline coat still worn ten years later, or the choice of silence over commentary in a world full of noise. It’s about trusting the quality of something — a garment, an object, an idea — without needing to overexplain it.

Taste is not a trend. Taste is cultural, yes, but not elitist. It’s not about brands or access. Good taste endures. It doesn’t demand attention; it earns it, slowly. While trends loop and churn and resurface with new names, taste is grounded in timelessness. Think of Sofia Coppola’s minimal scripts, or Axel Vervoordt’s serene interiors — stripped of anything non-essential, yet infinitely layered with meaning.

For me, taste is intuitive. Taste is often described as rational — a matter of trained judgment, educated eye, cultural awareness. But I believe it’s also deeply emotional. It’s about what moves you. What lingers with you. The things you return to, over and over, without tiring of them. In that sense, good taste becomes a kind of emotional clarity. It helps you distinguish not only what looks good, but what feels true.

Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to the idea of a moodboard as a map of the soul — an unspoken collection of references, textures, gestures, and memories. A 1950s photograph of a woman dressed elegantly, the weathered patina of an old wooden floor, the way light moves across stone at midday. These fragments shape my internal compass. They remind me that beauty often hides in quiet places. My daily musings and the pieces I create at Neithé Atelier respond to that sensibility. To design is to edit. To refine. To protect the essence of something rather than dilute it with noise. That, to me, is the art of good taste: knowing when to stop.

This is why I care more about how something feels than how it’s labelled, and why I believe in small batches and long lifespans. Why I think elegance has nothing to prove. Taste isn’t something you chase. It’s something you cultivate — slowly, personally, and with care. If taste is a language, I want to speak it slowly and thoughtfully. I want my taste to be quietly powerful. Good taste is about presence. About choosing objects, clothes, and ideas that stand the test of time, not because they followed a formula, but because they followed a feeling. That, to me, is the true art of good taste.

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