Taste is inherited more often than it is invented. The things we now consider self-evidently elegant or effortlessly cool usually trace back to a handful of figures who made a decisive choice, defended it in public, and waited for the rest of the world to catch up. Influence of this kind is rarely loud in the moment; it is recognised in hindsight, once the once-radical has quietly become the default. That slow rewriting of the collective eye is the subject we find most worth studying at Sixated, because it reveals how much of what feels timeless was once simply someone’s nerve.
The six below are documented across biography, photography, recording and film in such depth that their impact can be discussed plainly and without invention. Each operated in a different arena – fashion, music, letters, image-making, public life – yet each shifted the culture’s sense of what was possible. One dismantled the boundary between costume and identity; another emancipated a whole silhouette; a third changed how a public figure could speak and be seen. None set out merely to be stylish. Style was the residue of a larger seriousness, the visible trace of people who were trying to do something more ambitious than look good.
What connects them is that they treated taste as a form of authorship, and it is the same authorship we keep tracing through our continuing study of icons. They did not follow the room; they furnished it, and we have been living inside their choices ever since. The lesson is not to imitate any one of them but to understand how a single, committed point of view can outlast its author and become part of the air we breathe without noticing. Read the six that follow as a short history of how modern taste was actually made – deliberately, publicly, and by people who refused the options on offer.
1. David Bowie
Bowie made reinvention itself into a discipline. Across his documented career he treated persona, image and dress as materials to be reworked at will, dissolving the line between performance and self. The lasting influence is permission: the idea, now widespread, that identity can be authored and re-authored rather than simply inherited.
Why it made the six: He established reinvention as a legitimate creative act and expanded what a public self could be.
2. Gabrielle Chanel
The historical record credits Chanel with helping to free the female silhouette from earlier constraints and with elevating simplicity, ease and a certain borrowed-from-menswear practicality. Her influence on the modern wardrobe is foundational and thoroughly documented. She changed not just clothes but the underlying idea of what elegance required.
Why it made the six: She reset the baseline of modern elegance toward ease and simplicity, and it never reset back.
3. James Baldwin
Baldwin shaped taste in the largest sense – the taste for clarity, moral seriousness and precise language in public life. As one of the twentieth century’s essential essayists and speakers, his documented voice set a standard for how ideas could be expressed with both elegance and force. His influence is on the culture’s mind as much as its eye.
Why it made the six: He proved that style of thought and expression is culture-shaping, and that elegance lives in language too.
4. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Onassis is among the most documented figures in the history of public image, and her restrained, considered presentation influenced a generation’s sense of poise. Her later decades of work in publishing and preservation further shaped cultural taste. She is a study in how a public figure’s composure can itself become an aesthetic standard.
Why it made the six: She turned public composure into an enduring template for dignified, understated presence.
5. Miles Davis
Davis reshaped taste twice over – in sound and in self-presentation. His documented reinventions across jazz repeatedly redirected the music, while his sharp, evolving personal style made him a lasting reference for cool. He embodied the idea that artistic restlessness and personal aesthetic could be two expressions of the same refusal to stand still.
Why it made the six: He linked artistic reinvention to personal style, defining ‘cool’ as a moving target rather than a pose.
6. Cecil Beaton
Beaton shaped taste from behind the camera and the drawing board. As a widely documented photographer and designer, his images and stage work helped define mid-century notions of glamour and elegance. He is a reminder that much of what we consider iconic was framed by someone whose job was to decide how beauty should be seen.
Why it made the six: He shows that taste is often authored by the image-makers who decide how we look at everyone else.
The Sixated take
The common thread is authorship. Bowie authored the self, Chanel the silhouette, Baldwin the sentence, Onassis the public composure, Davis the sound and the stance, and Beaton the image – and each committed to a point of view fully enough that it outlived them and became ordinary. That is how modern taste was built, not by consensus but by conviction, and it is worth remembering that every one of these choices was once contested before it was accepted. The takeaway for the rest of us is not to copy these figures but to recognise that taste is made, deliberately, by people willing to furnish the room rather than wait to be told how it should look. Our archive of cultural and style icons exists to keep that recognition sharp, one authored point of view at a time.