There’s a delicious moment in the new Netflix documentary Beckham that feels destined to be replayed in sociology lectures. Victoria Beckham, in a tasteful white blouse, announces to the camera that she works very hard and is actually “very working class”. Whereupon David pops in to ask what car her father drove her to school in. “Be honest.” Victoria evades, avers and finally admits it. “In the 80s my dad had a Rolls-Royce.”
Nathalie Olah, I suspect, would have a field day with this. Bad Taste is her update of Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu’s classic 1979 inquiry into the tastes of Parisian intellectuals, retooled for the age of Instagram, Kinfolk magazine, Glossier makeup tutorials and the sort of minimally chic interiors favoured by the Beckhams, Britain’s pre-eminent social voyagers.
Victoria is hardly alone in leaning on a working-class identity to tell a flattering story about where she came from and therefore how much she deserves to be where she is now. As Olah notes, in the popular imagination, “class” has become untethered from Marxist notions of labour and ownership and is now presented as more like a consumer identity. We also have the secondary definition of class, from “high class”, connoting elegance, refinement, taste. “To have taste was to have class was to have understood the social codes enforced by the protectors of money and opportunity,” writes Olah. If Victoria Beckham has transcended her working-class roots it is not through money but taste. In a 2022 Tatler article about “the new modern status symbols” (Teslas, rewilded estates, Ottolenghi spices) the Beckhams are praised as “masters of their meticulously crafted empires”.
Olah proves an astute and acidic commentator on these codes, noting how trends for minimalist homes, luxe normcore, natural makeup and “clean eating” conceal unsubtle judgments on those who lack the time and means to, say, ferment their own kimchi or keep abreast of sneaker drops. In an excellent chapter on leisure (prompted by a disastrous Airbnb “experience”), she notes that time itself is the ultimate luxury, with life increasingly pitched as “a finite commodity that needs to be well spent”. Hence: bucket lists, ultramarathons, 1001 Amazing Places You Must See Before You Die, etc.
Olah has her own class trajectory to bring to this tale. Born into a working-class family in Birmingham, she got into university, acquired highbrow literary tastes, found precarious work in the east London “creative” industries – but no financial security. One position involved filing the expense receipts of a wealthy magazine publisher who wrote “guerilla poetry” about the proletariat in Moleskine notebooks, worshipped Tilda Swinton and mocked female colleagues for their handbags and heels. It was a type she would frequently encounter: “wealthy and upwardly mobile but apparently keen to conceal their lucrative place in an exploitative economy through aesthetic choices of a more austere impression”.
Olah argues that these distinctions matter, materially, more than ever. Employers under pressure to avoid explicit forms of discrimination place an ever greater emphasis on “cultural fit”. Gig workers find that poor taste in music, dress or conversation means they don’t get hired. Moreover, we have a whole generation of university-educated young people, adept at reading social cues but unable to access the wealth “hoarded” by more fortunate generations. Taste, in Olah’s reading, is all they have (at least until some of them inherit). Olah conjures a peer group creating “small vignettes of respectability in the shabby corners of rented bedrooms” for Instagram and then being mocked for it. “It is nothing if not sad that they staked their place in luxury through the sharing of a bowl of picante olives.”
The sections on housing are very good but Olah is on less solid ground when it comes to beauty and food. The fashions for “natural beauty” and for “clean eating”, it is true, mask a good deal of snobbery. But biology surely has some small role to play in who we find hot or not; and whole foods simply are more nutritious than ultra-processed food. Throughout Olah depicts working-class people as passive victims, “told to conceal their desires and conform to a set of autocratic rules decided by those in power”, which not only takes away their agency but expresses a strange lack of interest in working-class codes of taste.
There are other curious omissions. Olah chooses not to pay much attention to art, music, TV, film or literature and I’m not sure why. The book is clearly aimed at an American audience and draws most of its examples from a sort of bland mid-Atlantic Netflixland; Olah would have done better to follow Bourdieu’s lead and focus on her own local specifics. Lord knows there is plenty to say about the English and taste. Moreover, I didn’t believe her claim that she would like to live in a world where taste is a mere “facet of character”, devoid of moral judgments. She’s pretty judgy herself, as in her discussion of the endurance race Tough Mudder, “an event whose name I can barely bring myself to type”. Horrors!
I was left wondering if these autocracies of taste are as influential as Olah thinks they are. Take food. The Guardian’s restaurant critic is an unapologetic fan of Heinz spaghetti hoops, while the newsletter Vittles, the modern arbiter of urban foodie tastes, loudly champions working-class cooking. In progressive circles, moreover, I suspect it would be seen as gauche to mock someone for wearing the wrong trainers, but absolutely OK to rip them for enjoying Secret Cinema’s immersive film events. Still, as long as you’re conversant with the right French theorists and broadcast the correct opinions on social media, you’re probably OK.
• Bad Taste: The Politics of Ugliness by Nathalie Olah is published by Dialogue (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
