Materials databases and the future of taste

Taste looks like a personal trait and behaves like an infrastructure problem. The reason a certain shade of orange feels right in 2026 and wrong in 2019 isn't that the collective unconscious shifted overnight. It's that somebody, somewhere, added a swatch to a database, and three seasons later it's in every storefront on Lafayette.

I've been spending time inside materials databases — Pantone-adjacent libraries, Material ConneXion, the spectral archives that paint and textile companies guard like state secrets. They're the boring backstage of culture. A taste is just a query against one of these, run by a person with enough authority to commit the result to production.

The interesting layer

The interesting layer is not the database itself. Pigments and fibers and weaves have existed forever. The interesting layer is the index — the metadata that lets a designer in Milan find the same off-white a designer in Tokyo specified last year, and lets a buyer in New York reorder it without ever touching the physical sample.

When the index gets better, taste compresses. When the index gets worse, taste fragments. Both are happening at once right now.

A guess

My guess is that the next decade of taste is going to be shaped less by influencers and more by whoever owns the highest-resolution material indexes — and by the small number of people who can read those indexes like a sommelier reads a wine list. The models will help, but only at the edges. The core skill is still: hold a sample under the light, name what's wrong with it, write the name down.

That last part — writing the name down — is the part most people skip. It's also the part that builds the database that builds the taste.

The whole thing is recursive. That's why it works.