Why do some designs feel just right, and others leave you with nothing?
The expression le goût juste actually comes from cooking. It describes the optimal balance where a dish expresses its authenticity, its quality, its origin, without artifice. Nothing added to compensate, nothing hidden behind technique. Just every element being exactly what it should be. And I have always believed fashion works exactly the same way. It is about how you dose the components, the materials, the colours, the volume, each one balanced with precision so that the final design feels just right. It goes beyond personal preference, beyond good taste in the subjective sense. It is what separates a design that travels through time from one that belongs to a season and disappears with it.
Le goût juste is not about a certain style, and it is not about making everything look good in a conventional sense. It is about daring to go beyond limits, to try something new and defend it completely. Miuccia Prada built an entire language around what the industry once called bad taste. Nylon bags, awkward colours, strange proportions. Yet the conviction behind it made the result feel inevitable. Rei Kawakubo with her label Comme des Garçons went even further, challenging everything, femininity, the body, beauty conventions, and yet every decision in her collections was completely committed and just.
This is what I call the commitment principle. In design you cannot stay in between. If a silhouette needs volume, push it all the way. If a colour feels too strong, that tension is often the reason it works. The moment you pull back because something feels like too much, you lose the idea entirely. You end up with a design that says nothing, that pleases no one, that belongs to no one. Le goût juste requires a point of view and the courage to defend it all the way to the end, even when it makes people uncomfortable, even when the client hesitates, even when the market seems to be going in a different direction. Having a vision is not enough. You have to hold it.
I remember working on a bag where everything was technically correct. The proportions, the construction, the details. And yet it felt too ordinary. We kept adjusting small things but nothing changed. The design was polite, and polite was the problem. We tried different sizes and pushed the volume further until it led us to an oversized version that finally made sense. Sometimes it simply takes time and experimentation to find the right point where the volume, the material and the details suddenly fall into place.
And yet le goût juste is becoming increasingly rare. Not because talent has disappeared, but because the conditions that allow it to develop have. Fast fashion changed everything, not just the product but the entire culture of creation. When a collection has to be designed, produced and delivered in weeks, there is no time to ask why. No time to look slowly, to observe, to question a decision until it becomes truly right. The result is an industry that copies references it barely understands. Ideas move faster than designers have time to digest them. Collections multiply, but conviction disappears. Today most design is made to fit in, to be safe, to sell immediately. And when you design only to sell immediately, you design against le goût juste. Because le goût juste never comes from speed. It comes from time, from looking, from the courage to be wrong before you are right.
So can le goût juste be learned? I believe it can. Some people are fortunate enough to grow up with it, raised by parents or grandparents who opened their eyes early and explained what works together and why. But it can also be developed later, through good fashion schools, through curiosity, through reading, looking and questioning. Looking at art, at design, at what earlier designers and artists created and asking why they made certain decisions. Not just admiring, but trying to understand the intention behind every choice. Then experimenting, making mistakes, trying again. It takes time. And it is never finished learning.
Until next issue, Bye Bye Studio