At twenty-five, I owned too many things. Too many clothes, too many books I'd never read, too many saved bookmarks in too many folders. My flat was a museum of enthusiasm - every surface covered with objects that represented something I was interested in or wanted to be interested in or thought I should be interested in. Maximalism as identity. The more you have, the more you are.
At forty, I own fewer things, but I like them all more. The bookshelf is smaller and every book on it has earned its place. The wardrobe is tighter and nothing in it is aspirational - it's all actually me, not the me I was performing. The flat has space in it, not because I read a book about minimalism, but because I finally know what I want and, more importantly, what I don't.
This is the thing nobody tells you about taste: it ages. Not like milk. Like wine. Like whisky. Like anything that gets more interesting as it gets more concentrated.
The accumulation phase
When you're young, taste is expansive. It has to be. You're sampling everything, trying to figure out what resonates. Every new magazine, every new band, every new designer, every new city is a data point. You say yes to everything because you don't yet have the information to say no with confidence.
I remember this phase vividly. In my twenties, working at my first agency in London, I was a sponge. Every creative director's bookshelf became my reading list. Every cool restaurant someone mentioned went on the list. Every design blog got bookmarked. I was building the reference library at speed, pulling things off every shelf in the cultural supermarket without much discrimination.
And that's fine. That's necessary. You can't refine what you haven't first collected. The accumulation phase is where you build the raw material that later editing will shape into something personal. The mistake isn't consuming too widely - it's never moving past consumption into curation.
The subtraction years
Somewhere in my mid-thirties, a shift happened. I stopped adding and started subtracting. Not all at once - it was gradual, almost imperceptible. But I noticed that I was less excited by new things and more appreciative of the things that had endured. The bands I kept coming back to. The designers whose work still moved me years later. The restaurants where the food was never fashionable but was always excellent.
This felt, at first, like a loss. Like I was becoming less curious, less open, less culturally alive. The twenty-five-year-old version of me would have looked at the forty-year-old version and seen someone who'd narrowed. Who'd stopped exploring. Who'd settled.
But that's not what happened. What happened was filtration. The years of wide consumption had given me enough data to recognise what actually mattered to me versus what I'd adopted because it was expected, or fashionable, or what the people around me valued. The subtraction wasn't a loss of range. It was the beginning of a point of view.
What endures, what falls away
Here's what I outgrew: the need for things to be cool. The anxiety of not knowing about the latest thing. The compulsion to have an opinion on everything cultural. The belief that taste meant being ahead of everyone else.
Here's what endured: the love of craft. The appreciation for things made with care, regardless of whether they're fashionable. The pull toward materials that feel good in the hand. The instinct for proportion, for space, for the right amount of the right thing. The belief that how something is made matters as much as what it is.
Football endured. Forest, specifically. Not because it's cool - it decidedly isn't, most of the time - but because it's real, and it's mine, and the aesthetic of a Saturday afternoon at the City Ground is something I chose before I knew what choosing meant. It's taste from before taste became self-conscious.
Print magazines endured, even as the world went digital. I still buy them. Still love the weight, the layout, the smell. The pace of a magazine - monthly, considered, edited - suits the way I think better than the infinite scroll ever will. That's not nostalgia. That's a preference I've had long enough to trust.
Japan endured. The obsession that started in my twenties has only deepened. Because Japanese design doesn't trend. It evolves slowly, respects tradition, privileges craft. It rewards the kind of attention that gets richer over time, which is exactly how ageing taste works.
The confidence of knowing
The biggest change between twenty-five and forty isn't what you like. It's how certain you are about it. Young taste is performative - you wear it externally, you signal it, you use it to locate yourself socially. You like things partly because other people will see that you like them.
Mature taste is quieter. It doesn't need validation. You order the thing you want, not the thing that's interesting to order. You wear what feels right, not what communicates the right message. You choose the restaurant because you love the food, not because it'll photograph well. The audience shifts from everyone else to yourself.
This is why I drink hot chocolate. I've had decades of people raising eyebrows - a grown man, in a meeting, ordering hot chocolate. At twenty-five, that bothered me. At forty, I genuinely don't care. I don't like coffee. I never have. Hot chocolate makes me happy. That's the whole story, and it took fifteen years to be comfortable telling it without a disclaimer.
The circle back
The most interesting thing about ageing taste is the way it circles back. Things you dismissed at twenty-five reappear at forty with new meaning. I spent years thinking serif typefaces were old-fashioned. Now this entire blog is set in DM Serif Display, and it feels more like me than any sans-serif ever did. I spent my twenties thinking my dad's taste in interiors was boring - brown leather, dark wood, warm lighting. Now I've basically recreated his living room in mine, and it feels like coming home.
This isn't regression. It's recognition. The things your parents and grandparents valued often represented genuine quality that you were too young and too busy being contemporary to appreciate. The circle back isn't going backwards. It's understanding, finally, what was there all along.
Modern Retro, the project I'm proudest of, is essentially a giant circle back. The 1970s retail aesthetic it celebrates is the visual language of my parents' generation - warm, textured, typographically bold, unafraid of colour. I spent twenty years moving away from that towards clean, modern, minimal. And then I came back to it, not out of nostalgia but out of recognition that it had qualities - warmth, character, personality - that the modern aesthetic had stripped away.
Still evolving
The danger, of course, is calcification. Taste that stops evolving becomes conservatism. The man who only listens to music from the decade when he was twenty. The woman who dresses the same way she did at thirty. There's a version of ageing taste that's just stubbornness with good branding.
The antidote is the same as it always was: keep looking. Keep going to the bookshop, the gallery, the new restaurant. Keep travelling. Keep opening tabs and following threads and consuming things outside your comfort zone. The difference is that at forty, you consume with a filter that at twenty-five you didn't have. You can take what serves you and leave what doesn't, because you know what you're looking for.
Taste ages. It narrows and deepens and concentrates. It loses the anxiety and gains the certainty. It circles back to things it once dismissed and finds gold. It stops performing and starts simply being.
I like fewer things now. But I like them properly. And that, I think, is the whole point.
