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“Good taste” is one thing on the tongue, and wholly another on the psyche. It has long disguised itself as a universal instinct. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) dismantled that illusion, showing how preferences we imagine to be natural—wine over beer, linen over polyester—are instead learned behaviors. Who knew? Taste, in other words, is a form of social currency dressed up as intuition.
These behaviors have been taught (or in some cases, inflicted) throughout history. Colonial empires exported their codes of refinement across the globe. Afternoon tea, for instance, became a ritual in India not by accident but by design. British colonials staged it as proof of their “civilized” superiority, even as the tea itself was cultivated on land seized and worked by others.
Hanoi’s tree-lined boulevards, built under French rule, were modeled on Paris and populated with neoclassical façades, cafés, and opera houses. Lagos, under British administration, was divided into “government quarters,” complete with lawns and social clubs, while indigenous housing was denigrated as disorderly. Food, too, was conscripted. In French North Africa, wine was positioned as the beverage of sophistication, while traditional drinks like palm wine or mint tea were dismissed as quaint or provincial.
Perfume is the same. European houses defined the canon of “luxury scent,” yet the ingredients—oud from the Middle East, sandalwood from India, patchouli from Indonesia—were harvested from colonized geographies. Stripped of their original meanings, these materials were rebranded as raw luxury, their cultural roots obscured in the process. Even now, we are continuously learning more and more about the provenance of perfume materials and how they are cultivated, or what they symbolize. Some would call this type of learning lifelong.
Even language bears the imprint of hierarchy. In 19th-century Britain, etiquette guides insisted “napkin” was the correct term, while “serviette” was condemned as vulgar, too French, too aspirational. A single word could signal whether one belonged at the table or merely served it.
Local traditions adapted, resisted, and often outlasted the imported codes. The colonial dream of universal refinement proved unstable, its supposed permanence undermined by the very cultures it sought to overwrite. The napkin, once a marker of etiquette, becomes instead a canvas for reinvention—at least, it is chez Serviette. If Bourdieu saw taste as a field of power, we prefer to see it as a site of play. To cultivate taste is not to obey its rules but to question them, and perhaps to embroider one’s own.