Once upon a time, producing anything — from products and campaigns, to websites and brand worlds — took time and money. Those constraints created natural barriers to entry, while the friction of the making process forced brands to refine their approaches to craft and develop a real point of view. But with the rise of AI, this is no longer the case.
Content that once required significant human input can now be generated more easily and cheaply, raising the risk of sameness, or what some critics have dubbed “AI slop”. And at the same time, it is reinforcing an industry pattern that was most prominent during the luxury slowdown: brands defaulting to safe, repeatable products with minimal creative risk.
“It was easier to stand out pre-AI,” says Tony Wang, founder of Office of Applied Strategy (OAS), a think tank and consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Prada, Chanel, and Cartier. “Now, the competitive pressure — both internal and external — is much higher. What do they actually want to be as a brand, especially when AI can emulate their style or even replicate their business model?”
In this environment of infinite content and increasingly derivative output, taste has emerged as both a filter and a differentiator. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important,” Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham said back in February. “When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.”
Historically, taste in a brand context is signaled through heritage and the consistency of house codes developed over time, often reinforced by creative directors returning to the archives to recontextualize these elements for the present. Today, those markers still hold weight, but are complicated by the ease with which generative AI can produce similar-looking content without any grounding in context or understanding of why those references matter.
Expressing taste in 2026 is therefore threefold: what a brand chooses to make, as the realm of possibility continues to expand; the distinctiveness and quality of those choices; and how they align with the label’s values and worldview.
As AI usage approaches ubiquity and the barriers to creation continue to fall, what does good taste look like and how can brands express it?
Taste as a tool for judgement
Notoriously difficult to define, taste sits somewhere between instinct and sensibility. “I define taste as someone’s point of view and the world they build around that,” says Isabella Burley, founder of Climax Books and former CMO of Acne Studios. “It’s incredibly personal. For me, it’s built up over decades of references and research.”
