I own three pairs of Stan Smiths. They are not my personality. They are also not, as the Twitter discourse occasionally insists, evidence of having no personality. They are, like every aesthetic choice anyone has ever made, a signal — and pretending signals don’t matter is a kind of dishonesty I refuse to participate in.
The take, before we get into it: people who confuse taste with personality are insufferable. People who pretend taste reveals nothing about personality are lying. There is a defensible middle, and most of you live in it.
§ 01 — The discourse, briefly
Twice a year, the same conversation happens on whatever social platform is least dead at the moment. Someone posts a photo of a millennial-adjacent woman in Stan Smiths, a linen jumpsuit, and a $290 hand-thrown ceramic mug. The replies divide into two camps. Camp one calls this “having taste.” Camp two calls this “having no personality.” Both camps are wrong in slightly different ways and the wrongness is instructive.
Camp one — “this is taste” — is conflating recognizing a familiar aesthetic vocabulary with having one’s own point of view. Stan Smiths in this context are not taste. They are an unanswered prompt. They are the aesthetic equivalent of ordering the seasonal special at a restaurant — defensible, low-risk, and entirely uninformative about who you are.
Camp two — “this is no personality” — is conflating visible adherence to a recognizable style cluster with the absence of inner life. A person can wear Stan Smiths and a linen jumpsuit and also be the most interesting person at the dinner party. The shoes are not the diagnostic. They are a single data point in a much larger dataset, and the people insisting otherwise are mostly people who, themselves, are dressed entirely in opinion-as-fashion and would like everyone else’s outfit to do the work of being legible.
The discourse, in other words, is a fight between two groups of people who both have the wrong model of how taste actually transmits information.
§ 02 — What aesthetics actually signal
Aesthetics signal where someone has spent attention. Not how interesting they are. Not how creative. Not how worthwhile to know. Just where their attention has been.
If you see a person in carefully chosen Stan Smiths, a linen shirt that fits, and a pair of glasses with a frame that someone clearly thought about — you can reasonably infer they have spent attention on contemporary minimalist clothing. That tells you something. It does not tell you they are minimalist thinkers. It does not tell you their politics. It does not tell you whether they read. It tells you that in the small corner of their life dedicated to what they put on their body in the morning, they have made deliberate choices that align with a recognizable aesthetic vocabulary.
That is a real signal. It is a small signal. It is a signal that needs to be combined with at least four other signals before it becomes a coherent read on a person. But pretending it is no signal at all is the kind of false-modesty performance that affluent urban people put on when they don’t want to admit they are also doing aesthetic-based filtering of who they let into their dinner party.
I am going to be honest about something the rest of this discourse refuses to be honest about: I do aesthetic-based filtering too. When I meet someone and they are in head-to-toe shapeless fast fashion, I am not assuming they have less to say. I am, however, assuming we will probably not bond over the same coffee shops, the same boutique gym, the same independent bookstores in our respective cities. That assumption is sometimes wrong. Often, it is right. The aesthetic signal is doing work, and pretending I haven’t read it would be lying.
§ 03 — When aesthetics become a problem
The problem is not that people use aesthetic signals as a filter. The problem is when they treat the filter as the whole person.
I have met people whose entire identity is the aesthetic. Aesop hand soap in the bathroom, Le Labo Santal 33 on the wrist, a tasteful Diptyque candle on the coffee table, a Le Creuset Dutch oven on the stove that has never been used. The signaling is impeccable. The substance underneath the signaling is, on inspection, a job in marketing they are mediocre at and a Letterboxd account that consists of four-star ratings for movies they have not seen.
The contemporary version of this is even louder. The Stanley Cup phenomenon of 2023-24 — when a $45 thermos turned into a status object so absolute that grown adults were lining up at 5 AM outside Target — was an aesthetic identity moment cosplaying as a hydration choice. The “quiet luxury” wave that flooded everything after the second season of Succession aired was Phoebe Philo’s old Céline language being downloaded wholesale by people who had never owned a piece of Philo’s actual work. The “clean girl aesthetic” was an entire generation of TikTok users adopting a uniform — slicked-back bun, gold hoops, dewy skin, oversized A24 tote — and treating the uniform as if it were a worldview. Every one of these moments is the same pattern: borrowed aesthetic doing the work that an interior life is supposed to.
This is the failure mode the “no personality” camp is reacting to, and they are reacting to it correctly. There are people who have outsourced their entire identity to a Whole Foods cart. There are people whose Pinterest board is more thought-through than their actual opinions. The aesthetic, in their case, has become the personality, and there is nothing else.
The fix is not to throw out the aesthetic. The fix is to ensure the aesthetic is downstream of an actual interior life, not a substitute for one. Buy the Stan Smiths because they go with everything you already own, you’ve been wearing them for a decade, and you don’t want to think about your feet. Don’t buy them because the algorithm told you and you are auditioning for the part.
§ 04 — The personal receipt
I own, as confessed, three pairs of Stan Smiths. White-on-white. White with green. White with navy. I wear them most days. I have worn them on dates, to client meetings, to the gym (poor decision), to airports, to wedding receptions when the dress code was loose. They are easy. They go with everything. I do not have to think about them.
That is the actual function of an aesthetic uniform, and I will not be ashamed of it. The Steve Jobs black-turtleneck, the Anna Wintour bob, the Tom Ford black suit — every person who has decided to free up cognitive load by removing one daily decision has known what they were doing. They were not making a statement about minimalism. They were buying back twenty minutes a morning to spend on something else.
My Stan Smiths are buying me twenty minutes. The minutes I get back, I spend on the things that actually are my personality — the writing, the lifting, the obsessive over-thinking of category positioning, the way I argue with my mother about how to cook dal. The shoes are infrastructure. The personality lives elsewhere.
§ 05 — The take
Aesthetic choices are signals, not identities. They tell you where someone’s attention has been. They are useful as filters. They are catastrophic as substitutes. The people who insist their taste is their personality are usually people whose personality is in arrears. The people who insist taste signals nothing are usually people whose taste is, themselves, signaling rather loudly that they would prefer not to be read.
If you are out there worrying that your Stan Smiths and your tote bag and your minimalist apartment make you “basic,” I have news for you: the only person genuinely worried about being legible as basic is a person who has not yet developed the other half of the package. Build the other half. Read the books. Have the opinions. Make the things. Get the deadlift PR. Cook the dish your grandmother taught you. The aesthetic will, in retrospect, look like the obvious cover for the actual interesting thing underneath.
The Stan Smiths are not your personality. The Stan Smiths are the shoes. The personality is what you are doing in them. Now go and do something interesting in them, please, because frankly the discourse cannot survive another round of this.
If you see me in Dallas, I will be wearing the white-on-white. You will not learn my personality from them. But you’ll have a place to start, and that’s more than nothing.