“ Once it seemed that working out your taste muscle was part of growing up and defining yourself. But over time, the desire to look good, the willingness to care about appearance, to be fashionable, became taboo for a large swath of the population, Ms. Pearlstein said. The people who cared about aesthetics cared deeply. Everyone else? They lost their appetite to be discerning. A sameness descended. It didn’t happen abruptly, as if we stepped off a cliff into an abyss of blah. It happened incrementally.”
This whole piece is good:
