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A photo illustration of Jenna Lyons wearing a bright pink floral jacket and loose jeans, standing in front of a row of women wearing beige blazers with their backs to the camera.

The Real Housewives franchise presents wealth as a uniform experience with occasional regional specialties. The ladies from one city may go shopping at a megamall, while in another they prefer browsing designer clothes outdoors. But nearly every housewife loves a sheath dress, a Gucci handbag and sitting down to lunch to resolve their differences. (It always backfires.)

The conformity of the show is what makes the presence of Jenna Lyons, who reinvented J. Crew in the 2000s with an explosive aesthetic of cubicle-bound glamour meets Prada weirdness, so intriguing. She made her debut on the series, which ran from 2008 to 2021 with many recurring cast members, in the 2023 reboot that saw the network scrap the original cast.

When her “Real Housewives of New York City” castmates arrive in the Hamptons in a black Escalade, she pulls up to the driveway in a banker blue vintage Mercedes sedan. While her castmates are content to frolic in the awkwardly oversized beige expanse of one cast member’s Hamptons home, Lyons escapes to her own Hamptons house — a 1,200-square-foot bungalow in art world enclave Amagansett that contrasts delectably with her host’s five-bed, seven-bathroom remodel. The others favor form-fitting clothes from a familiar set of designers; Lyons wears boyish blazers with no bra underneath, glittering Miu Miu button-ups, oversize glasses and funky lipstick.

Brian Ach

Her style — not simply her clothes but her apartment, her self-presentation and even her blunt but enchanting conversational style — is so inimitable that the other housewives are left practically speechless when they first see Lyons’s closet, chockablock with Phoebe Philo-era Celine, Alessandro Michele-era Gucci, countless vintage jeans and well-loved Prada coats. In one episode, two of them descended into giggles playing dress-up in the closet — these women, we are asked to believe, are some of New York’s richest and most powerful figures, suddenly seeming like two school nerds invited to the rich and popular girl’s house.

It’s a reminder of what made Lyons’s tenure at J. Crew stand out for so many women: Jenna Lyons has taste.

Our world is dominated by algorithms — by data collection that steers us toward a limited set of products and designers who have paid for the privilege of coming up first in our search. The result is that our taste has gotten, as the Real Housewives suggested, only more homogeneous, more limited. It’s hard to find something special — and why look for it, anyway?

Ads on Instagram often look as polished as magazine spreads, and on TikTok, ads are often just as funny, shocking or downright engaging as non-sponsored content.

The idea that you might like something because it’s unusual, or because your well-trained eye recognizes something no one else can, is almost foreign to many shoppers in their 20s and 30s.

“If you can just live in an Ikea room happily, you should. If you could just wear T-shirts and jeans every day, you should,” says Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director of the Design Leadership Network, who published “<a href="https://amzn.to/3YQFp4b" target=_blank>The New Antiquarians: At Home With Young Collectors</a>” in June. “But if your soul cries out for something else, then how do you follow that call to a state of peace and joy in your physical environment?”

Monacelli

Diaz-Griffith’s book focuses on 17 subjects, nearly all in their 30s, whose living spaces are so singular that they seem to spring from an almost anti-algorithmic world.

They suggest a passion for living in a way that is ambivalent to the confines of Instagram’s frame or TikTok’s editing preferences. Some of the images seem to resist the photographer’s eye; Emily Eerdmans’s home is an explosion of floral patterns recalling 1980s power decorator Mario Buatta, also known as the “Prince of Chintz.” It is enormously charming but also a collision of florals, outrageous lamps and shocking chartreuse with pinks and purples. The point is that Eerdmans likes it — whether an audience might aspire to live there, or copy her every choice, is decidedly not the point.

Instead, these are sanctuaries of personal obsession and expression. In spaces such as interior designer Jared Austin’s Harlem apartment or Andrew LaMar Hopkins’s New Orleans abode, there is a mind-set of connoisseurship, Diaz-Griffith said.

This is at odds with the contemporary style of consumerism. “It’s about letting your developing taste both inform your sense of connoisseurship,” he says, “but being all right with letting that sense of taste redirect you over time to other things.”

Layers of textiles from all over the world sit alongside an altar of erotic male nude bronze figurines; a silk opera coat is slung over a door next to a gallery wall of highly mannered portraits. It is not a commitment to any kind of bit but a peek into the minds of people who, through reading or researching or sheer accidental curiosity, end up buying every cheap piece of Bauer pottery they can find.

And what makes this compelling is less the volume of stuff but what it suggests about the person who is at its center — as the late Bunny Mellon epitomized in the mid-20th century, with her countless baskets and Impressionist masterpieces slung casually against the wall.

Whether it’s the oddness of one’s interiors or Lyons’s sheer confidence in wearing enormous glasses with bright lipstick, these outward choices seem more than surface — aesthetic. For those who are used to the automation of direct-to-consumer products (and their manicured, rounded edges), these choices can suggest a person underneath, someone whose unusual mind or way of thinking encouraged them to live slightly differently than everyone else.

In the meantime, a small rebellion is also bubbling up against the classic influencer.

Influencing, in the fashion space, began as an offshoot of fashion blogging, in which young women offered an unusual perspective on fashion, one that couldn’t be found inside the pages of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar.

Tavi Gevinson, who began her blog Style Rookie as an 11-year-old who posed in borrowed Comme des Garçons and Rodarte, or Leandra Medine, whose off-kilter sense of humor blended an Elaine Stritch sensibility with a maximalist uptown polish on her site Man Repeller, helped bring fashion to a more human but no less rabid audience. And brands quickly took notice by anointing bloggers with bags, front-row seats and lavish gifts.

Once the gifting took over — and women realized they could charge tens of thousands of dollars per social media post — the originality essential to fashion blogging’s initial success receded. In its place came the veneer of a successful, aspirational lifestyle; the idea was for an influencer to look as cool and carefree as possible so that women could understand exactly what they didn’t have (and needed, immediately).

What seemed like a fun alternative quickly became homogeneous.

“The kernel of this innate, benevolent desire to disrupt the system became its own form of establishment,” as Medine puts it. “And so no longer was the desire to become part of the disruption, so much as part of the new establishment.”

And consumers seem increasingly skeptical of the idea that they should buy a handbag or visit a place just because an influencer posts about it. So prevalent is the sense that digital marketing and data have too much control over what we want and desire <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-has-started-to-let-people-think-for-themselves/#:~:text=TikTok%20is%20making%20its%20algorithm,right%20to%20%22cognitive%20liberty.%22" target=_blank>that TikTok is experimenting with letting users turn off their algorithm</a> — a move that many are praising as a step forward in protecting <a href="https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/nita-farahany/" target=_blank>“cognitive liberty,”</a> a term developed by a Duke University professor to describe our fundamental right to avoid unwanted interference on our privacy and thought from digital data.

In one scene much discussed in fashion communities on social media, Lyons admonishes the outfit of another Real Housewives cast member, Jessel Taank, as they prepare to go out to dinner because she is wearing both an Alexander Wang logo and a Balenciaga logo. “One label is fine,” Lyons says in her confessional, unable to articulate the logic. “You don’t need to have — like, it’s too much.”

“Jenna Lyons just called me a fashion victim!” Taank yells, stalking away in anguish.

The desire not to become a fashion victim seems to be the thinking behind the rise of shopping newsletters. After Medine closed Man Repeller in late 2020 amid a cloud of controversy, she pivoted to Instagram. But she found it wasn’t substantive enough.

“This is what is missing from the business of influence,” she recalls thinking. On social media, “there’s no anchor that pulls the content down and gives it the kind of context that makes you feel like you’re inside of a world that somebody else is letting you into.” She launched a newsletter, <a href="https://leandramcohen.substack.com/" target=_blank>the Cereal Aisle</a>, in January 2021 on Substack.

Since then, others such as <a href="https://www.magasin.ltd/" target=_blank>Laura Reilly’s Magasin</a> and <a href="https://5thingsyoushouldbuy.substack.com/" target=_blank>Becky Malinsky’s 5 Things You Should Buy</a> have emerged, providing a friendlier, more personalized version of what the market pages of fashion magazines typically do. (Unlike a fashion magazine, these newsletters do not have traditional advertiser relationships, though many, including Medine’s, Reilly’s and Malinsky’s, use affiliate revenue programs that provide them a percentage of sales made from links in their newsletter.)

Through themes or simply guided by their own eyes, they select what from the glut of products across Net-a-Porter, Mytheresa, Ssense and other luxury sites is worth buying or at least paying attention to.

“I respect my taste,” Medine says. “My loyalty through all of this has to be to creative progress. And the way to stay close to creative progress is to also stay close to your taste.”

It is too soon to say whether developing one’s personal sense of style will be the paradigm shift that sweeps the intersection of fashion and social media. Medine sees it happening already — most shopping or fashion newsletters offer recommendations now, engaging in a sort of competition of best or rarest recommendations, something she calls “the commodification of taste.”

Diaz-Griffith already sees the homes of younger millennial and Gen Z collectors reflecting an even more naturalistic approach to this hyper-individualized assemblage of stuff as a reflection of one’s values and curiosity — see <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@kimandnorth/video/7256455991485664554?lang=en" target=_blank>Kim Kardashian and her daughter North cooking McDonald’s-inspired apple pies in their supernaturally minimalist kitchen designed by Axel Vervoordt</a>. (Yes, you read that right: Kim Kardashian may be a premier tastemaker.)

Or the way that brandishing rare vintage or secondhand clothes is the ultimate flex, instead of showing off designer labels. (<a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/trends/a37669147/stacking-your-watch/" target="_blank">One can see this quest brewing in the lionization of scratched luxury watches or beat-up Hermès handbags</a>.) The idea is to wear and use — and therefore love — your things, rather than treating them like museum pieces.

“This is an attitude and not an attempt to live inside an idealized lifestyle,” Diaz-Griffith says. “It fundamentally favors the objects because even though they may be destroyed, you’re working with the object, and you’re looking at the object and not just focused on the effect that it has when it’s all ‘arranged.’”

ASME nominee for reviews and criticism, 2023

University of Pennsylvania, BA in English and art history

Rachel Tashjian is a fashion writer at The Washington Post.

Rachel Tashjian

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Illustration by Chelsea Conrad/The Washington Post; Cindy Ord/Bravo; iStock

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