The Case for Bad Taste: Why Design Needs More Friction
- Nov 28, 2025
- 3 min read
How embracing bad taste, the slightly-off, the bold, and the misbehaving can give creativity its pulse
The Case for Bad Taste
Diana Vreeland understood something that still eludes many brands today: taste only becomes powerful when it dares to misbehave.
The unexpected, the slightly-off, the too-bold — these are the elements that inject pulse into culture.
Yet modern branding often polishes these edges away in favour of optimisation, neutrality, and universal appeal. In doing so, emotion is lost, and sameness quietly takes its place.
In a landscape obsessed with perfect grids and hyper-curated feeds, perfection has become sterile.
It’s forgettable. It’s safe — and safety is rarely where resonance is born.
What catches our attention isn’t what blends seamlessly into its surroundings, but what interrupts them. The friction. The spice. The human edge.
We’re living in an era shaped by algorithms that reward predictability.
But culture has always grown from the opposite — the unruly, the awkward, the “wrong.” Think of the silhouettes that defied proportion, the colour combinations that broke rules, the visuals that made no immediate sense.
These are the very choices that later become iconic.
It raises a quiet but essential consideration: are brands smoothing out the very details that could make them unforgettable?
Subtle tension in design can act like a spark — something the viewer can’t quite articulate but instantly feels. A visual that misbehaves slightly invites curiosity. A story that doesn’t resolve neatly lingers in the mind longer.
A texture that resists expectation demands touch. It’s the sensory equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
Of course, the immediate instinct in many brand teams is to refine.
To smooth. To “fix.” But what if refining isn’t always the path to connection? What if audiences are actually craving something more textured, more irregular, more human?
Cultural fatigue often comes not from excess, but from uniformity — when everything starts to look the same, the eye hungers for disruption.
Imagine a collection that intentionally incorporates asymmetry, or a campaign that leans into awkward humour rather than polished perfection. These elements don't disrupt for the sake of chaos — they disrupt to remind us of life. Human creativity has always thrived through small acts of rebellion. Friction is simply the contemporary form.
So perhaps the future of creativity isn’t about perfecting taste… but releasing it. Letting it breathe. Letting it surprise. Letting it misbehave just enough to feel alive.
If culture needs more pulse, then brands may need more “bad taste” — not as a gimmick, but as an invitation to reconnect with instinct, imperfection, and individuality. As Vreeland said, “A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika.” Without it, everything tastes the same.
Maybe the real question now is:Are brands ready to embrace more friction?movement.
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