The Business of Taste

Have we been over-influenced? In an online landscape where all platforms are competing for the smallest sliver of our attention, we’ve seen it all. There’s so much to absorb, so much to shop. When the options are endless, the problem is no longer access to information; it’s deciding what deserves our attention.

That’s why the internet’s most valuable commodity isn’t content anymore. It’s discernment. It’s taste.

Here’s the thing about taste: You can’t package it, sell it, or share it via an affiliate link. It isn’t defined by owning the most expensive handbag or discovering a trend. Taste acts as a filter—a point of view that separates what’s worth engaging with from, well, the rest.

This feels especially impactful in fashion. At any moment, we’re a click away from thousands of shopping recommendations and ideas of what (and what not) to wear. After years of algorithmic curation, trend saturation, and now the rise of AI-created content, we’ve arrived at an inflection point that will alter what and how we consume online, and the landscape of fashion influencing will be fundamentally changed.

Who What Wear has always been at the forefront of the creator landscape, and we have a long history of “calling” the cool names of the era—first the models off duty, then bloggers and Instagram fashion people, and now multi-platform curators. And because we are a digitally native publication, championing these creators is in our DNA.

So who are the creators defining this next era? They’re not exclusively documenting what they’re wearing or sharing what they bought. They’re offering a crucial value add: context, expertise, and a highly developed point of view. In other words, influence is becoming less about personal style and more about personal taste.

The End of the Influencer

If you felt like influencer-related backlash peaked this year, you weren’t imagining it. The term has become almost pejorative, a catchall for aspirational content, yes, but also relentless consumption and branding that feels overly engineered.

But beneath that growing sense of unease is something more interesting: an evolution in the relationship between influencers and their audiences, one that illuminates a broader change in what people have come to expect. Aspiration alone is no longer enough. Beautiful imagery has become table stakes. Followers increasingly crave expertise, education, cultural perspective, or access to ideas that we might not be able to easily find. “The biggest shift we’ve seen is that people need a reason to be loyal to you,” says Georgia Makely, global digital director at Ford Models, where she leads the agency’s influencer and creative talent division. “If you’re not going to be the person who’s saying, ‘Hey, guys, this is what I’m doing today,’ then you need to provide information to your audience, or they’ll look elsewhere. It’s been a forced evolution for a lot of talent.”

The traditional influencer mold is shattering in real time, and it’s ushering in a new class of talent that, according to Makely, hinges on a multi-hyphenate model. That looks like founders launching brands from the ground up, stylists sharing behind-the-scenes industry intel, creative directors showing how they build visual worlds, or collectors documenting their niche obsessions. The new prototype is all about deriving authority from credibility rather than visibility, and the very measures of success are shifting in tandem.

Julia Rabinowitsch began by selling vintage heels on her Instagram, The Millennial Decorator, before she realized that the real value add for her followers wasn’t the vintage drops themselves but the visual world she invited them into. Collector and curator Neelam Gill doesn’t merely display her vast collection of items from luxury labels like The Row, but she educates her audience on details like handbag specs so they can make informed shopping decisions. Tariro Makoni is a fashion critic whose insights help the casual fashion person analyze what they’re seeing come down the runway and put it into a broader cultural context.

For years, follower counts were treated as the defining KPI. Today, they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant. “Follower count isn’t even something that we show brands,” says Caley-Rae Pavillard, vice president of business development and partnerships at ShopMy. “It doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. You could have 500 people in your community who are completely bought into your taste, and that’s much more valuable than having 500,000 followers who maybe can’t articulate why they followed you in the first place.” In other words, community is replacing scale. Trust is replacing reach.

Expertise Over Appearance

Until very recently, fashion influencing was built on access to coveted wardrobes, glamorous vacations, front-row seats, and impeccably photographed lives. The image itself was the product.

Today, audiences demand more depth. Maybe it’s a natural result of living online for nearly two decades, or perhaps it comes from algorithms flattening everyone’s feeds. As consumers, we’ve become progressively more discerning about where we place our attention and, perhaps even more importantly, our trust. It’s not enough for creators to have a good eye; we want to follow people who can explain why something matters.

“We’ve landed in a place where people want an expert to be the one who’s giving them their information,” Makely explains. “They want to learn something from the talent they’re following instead of that parasocial relationship. People are demanding something from talent. They want to get something out of the deal.” That expectation has fundamentally changed the job description.

Rather than acting as living mood boards, a lot of creators now operate more like independent editors. They’re researching, synthesizing, and contextualizing information before presenting it to their audiences. That could mean explaining the workmanship behind a vintage watch, comparing the construction of two handbags, breaking down the history of a fashion house, or sharing years of accumulated knowledge from careers in styling, buying, or merchandising. “It’s almost like a Saturn return back to the blogging days,” Makely says. “They’re editors of their own little publications where they’re doing their own research and creating their own recommendations.”

Before there was Instagram, there were blogs. The appeal was as much about a writer’s point of view as it was their wardrobe. Today’s long-form TikToks and Substack sends are reviving that relationship. That shift is also reflected in how we shop. “People who have backgrounds in fashion and expertise—maybe they were former buyers or stylists—are really growing in terms of affiliate revenue,” says Pavillard. “People trust that they have experience and trust their recommendations a bit more.”

Expertise has become a commercial advantage, and increasingly, it can stand on its own and no longer requires a recognizable face to carry it. “One of [ShopMy’s] very top earners overall is a faceless account,” Pavillard says. “No one knows her name, and no one knows what she looks like. She shares products that she loves, and it works incredibly well.” Just a few years ago, that idea would have seemed almost impossible. Influencer culture has historically been built around personality and visibility. But the success of anonymous curation suggests audiences are becoming increasingly interested in what someone knows over who they are.

Now, the creator is no longer the product. Their perspective is. “[Audiences want] content that challenges the status quo or offers an alternative to the typical luxury fashion conversation,” Gill says. “Whether it’s questioning pricing, quality, or integrity, I’ve found that audiences respond to content that feels honest, direct, and willing to ask difficult questions.”

Honesty, insider knowledge, and learning are now part of the value proposition. Makely often asks creators a deceptively simple question: What can people get from you? That question captures where influence is heading. “Back in the day, it used to be just highly aspirational, beautiful images, and that was enough. [Now] there needs to be a reason to be loyal and a reason to be invested.”

The most trusted voices today aren’t just suggesting products. They’re building entire worlds. If, let’s say, you already trust someone for their favorite white T-shirt or jeans recommendations, you’re much more likely to be interested in that boutique hotel they stayed at, the piece of furniture in the background of their outfit videos, or their regular spot for a morning matcha. Once someone earns your trust in one category, that trust naturally extends into others.

For Rabinowitsch, the shift from curating vintage luxury items to packaging her perspective has allowed her to build a multi-platform audience and make content that goes far beyond selling a pair of archival Manolo Blahnik heels. “People now value my taste,” she explains. “Whether that’s a curation of vintage products, education around a Cartier watch [or] vintage Ralph Lauren jacket, or a travel recommendation, it’s part of the world that I’m building.”

This idea of world-building is perhaps the sharpest departure from the influencer playbook of the past decade or so. Rather than existing as individual posts optimized for engagement, creators are increasingly sharpening what makes their points of view unique. When Rabinowitsch recommends a small vintage store or independent business, it’s because she took the time to learn about the owners and build relationships with them. “It can be a 65-year-old Italian woman whose shop is dead silent,” she says. “Then she’s getting all this business after I’ve shared it.”

Platforms such as ShopMy and LTK that arose to support affiliate-driven shopping initially revolved around beauty and fashion, but they’re quickly expanding to keep up with this multi-category interest—and capitalize on those transactions. “ShopMy started in beauty and fashion, but the natural evolution has been lifestyle, home, and some motherhood brands,” Pavillard says. “We’ve now started to expand into experiential verticals, too, like travel and hospitality, some live events and ticketing, and we expect that to grow a lot more in 2027. Travel is such a big category. It’s that full life experience that will start to show up.”

The Future of Influence

So where does this leave the creator economy? Despite claims of an influencer “bubble,” the landscape will only keep growing. The difference is that the “new” way to influence may not look like influencing at all.

“We’ll have less of an idea of the creator economy or ‘influencers,’” Pavillard predicts. “It’ll be more about people of influence who simply have really great taste. That could be the local mom dropping her kids off at school whose style everyone notices.” It doesn’t take an expert to see that the rise of AI has, paradoxically, made human taste more valuable than ever. “As AI becomes way more integrated into daily life, we’re going to want to lean into that idea of self-expression,” Pavillard underscores. “And what does that look like? It’s seeking out recommendations from other humans you like and how they represent and express themselves.”

That may be the truest sign that the influencer bubble hasn’t burst so much as it has expanded beyond the influencer. The next great tastemaker might not have a ring light, media kit, or six-figure follower count (yet). They just might have really, really good taste and the confidence to share it.