What is a lookbook from The Row if not an A-class suggestion for what to wear when you don’t know, or better yet, for how to wear the most basic and bland and beloved clothes in your closet?

And for occasions that require more practical advice — when you can’t think of what to wear because you’re going for this,

but with more personality, it is also the best recommendation churner.

When the Spring 2024 lookbook came out earlier this summer, the internet (that I occupy) was set ablaze with thrill.

When I look back at it, I wonder if I’d have similarly felt so compelled to fashion myself into similar renderings if the campaign were from, say, Lands’ End:

But I guess that’s the magic, the grace, the uncomfortable truth about what The Row gives to us.

Context for clothes we can recognize, that we are intimately familiar with, the right pin and tuck and spin on them to give them fashion gravitas. And there is also something more subtle — a respect for bad taste.

I have been thinking about taste on account of a story Rachel Tashjian Wise wrote for The Washington Post some weeks ago. It was called “Whatever happened to taste?” She and I spoke for the piece, which was mostly about the return of taste as informed by the unlikely placement of Jenna Lyons among the new cast of RHONY and the rising popularity of the fashion newsletter as a sort of antidote to what the business of influence has become, but our conversation (and her piece) got me thinking most about how we relate to our taste.

Everyone has it, but does everyone respect it? Recognize that it’s there, deign to nurture it?

In the post-Philo era of style and shopping, where so much of the late Celine designer’s minimalism still spins off on an axis of past fashion trends (with a few exceptions, like Prada or The Row, which is similar in conceit to old Celine but very much one in its own life-world), one of the reasons I suspect that many of us have grown bored with commercial fashion is because there is an essential ingredient missing from these spin-offs.

I have tried to distill this ingredient before — have tried to break it down and give it a name. I’ve called it creative risk tolerance, rough edge dressing, or most recently, refined maximalism. I’ve referenced the ugly, the tumbles, the blunders that are the essential components one must integrate in order to churn out good creative work.

But I think the most direct way to explain what has been missing is “bad taste.” I put in quote marks because it is relative, subjective, impossible to define by any measure of a universal term. And it is essential, too, as noted above, to the process of cultivating good taste.

The Row does a good job (just as Phoebe Philo did) of unleashing their own bad taste, tucking it into the good, folding it over the seams to create this dynamic, elusive and inviting image that we can’t quite make out but want to be part of.

The thing about taste, why it’s so relative is because it’s an innate, primal instinct. No more complicated than a person’s liking for a particular flavor. The precursor to style, a sense or a feeling, not so much a logic or what can be conceived through the thinking mind.

To judge it as good or bad or worse: to try to do away with you call your own “bad” taste is an errand for fools on the one hand because who is to say what is good or bad other than the actual sensor and a travesty on the other because you as the sensor deserve to know that what you like is what you like and you like it! Full stop.

In order to cultivate good style, you have to trust and respect the full range of your taste.

And in order to do this, you have to make room for the bad to run wild. To release the bad from the shackle of its title and to recognize that it’s part of the constellation of your likes. This is the magic sauce.

The best personal style reflects (but does *not* present as) the total sum of a person’s taste, and a person’s taste is informed by what moves them, intrigues them, what draws them to go a bit deeper. It is then spun out into something else that implores you or I to do the same. And that’s how the most inspiring stuff is made.

You can’t really know and transfer the good without incorporating the bad. And you can’t do that until you’ve become intimate with it. One sock on and the other off!

For this story, I analyzed some looks from The Row’s Spring 2024 lookbook and attempted an approximation of my own. They will be separated by lookbook reference, like this:

And real life rendering, like this:

Onwards:

Consider these looks reflective of formulas I constructed — less literal following of the recipes, more creative license within self-produced templates.

The most glaring recognition to come out of this exercise is that all the pants I own are the wrong length! Either too long or too short, not baggy enough or cropped enough. But it is what it is and I have what I have. Going short (as in hemming) is always easier than figuring out how how to go long.

Most importantly in conclusion though, there is no good taste without accepting, honoring, and respecting the bad. So do something weird! The Row would.

Until next time,

Leandra