The Taste & Change Report™: Alec Leach

A conversation with the fashion and sustainability icon on how to approach your style and your values.

Welcome to The Taste Report™, an interview series exploring and explaining taste from people who have supremely good taste. But this is also a Change Report™, an interview series exploring and explaining change from people who are making a difference in the world. Support The Trend Report™ by upgrading to a paid subscription 💚

I am sick of clothes but I am in love with clothes. I am sick of buying things, sick of money, but also know you need a bit of both to survive — and that getting something new and a big fat check gives me a rush, making me feel like a rat who has been trained to push a button for cocaine, to buzz and buzz and buzz even if nothing comes in return, even if I drive myself crazy and risk my life for the high.

It’s taken years of training but I’ve weaned myself off “the stuff,” meaning I rarely buy anything new and try to really not-buy-much other than food or tools to do my job. It feels like unplugging from The Matrix but it’s really just takes deleting your Amazon account and committing to get what you need in person, when you need it, versus pushing a button to get something online that you only kinda sorta need or want but are bored enough to get and middle class enough that such a purchase doesn’t matter. For me, this change came because of a drastic financial shift in recent years, as Bobby and I lost our jobs and were getting by on a very part-time job amidst a desert of opportunity.

This also dovetails into my being a long time someone who is conscious that the world is falling apart due to our clawing at it, that one has to manage desires with the impact of said desires. I can buy whatever shorts I want, sure, but that also means my hogging resources, wasting money, and generally contributing to another’s wealth at the expense of the planet and my own creativity. My carelessness results in all of our precarity for everyone, doesn’t it? And so does yours! Capitalism, consumerism, blah, blah, blah: you know the talking points. But are you actually doing anything about it? What does it mean to balance such a point of view with your taste? Is it possible? What is sacrificed? What is gained? In my opinion, such an approach truly unlocks the most elite taste, where philosophy and expression meet. Artists are perfect examples of people who embody this as their circumstances require creative solutions for their homes and their basic needs. This of course extends to the financially insecure and the countercultural at large: to be on the fringes in any way is where — and how — we undo the system. That is how we surface the great shutoff switch from capitalism with style: by being more self-reliant while also being ourselves.

In thinking about this merging of the mind and matter, one very specific person came to mind, someone who I’ve had a longtime writer-and-culture crush on as many of you probably do too: Alec Leach, the writer of the book The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes, the newsletter Ordinary Delusions, and former Highsnobiety editor. Alec has long been an esteemed voice in both fashion and sustainability but does the rare thing that all in the overlap fail at: practice what he preaches while elevating both worlds. His thinking and his practices go beyond the trendiness of the fashion industry and sustainability as a movement. People like him are proof that you can be conscious of what’s happening in the world while living a fruitful life. All it takes is a more evolved understanding of what life now could and should be like.

To understand his worldview, I reached out about having a chat — but I didn’t know if I wanted to talk taste or change with him. Thus, the very first crossover: a Taste and Change Report™ as Alec is someone with supreme taste while also playing a very active voice in shaping change. He and I chatted for nearly an hour, spanning the dangers of the status economy, the importance of buying for life, financial dysmorphia and how the wealthy propel these problems, and why you have to just say no to most shit in these times.

KRF: I wanted to have a conversation not just to talk about your style and your approach to life but also how that relates to and serves as an input or counterbalance to, say, political activity. I see these two things going hand-in-hand and I see that very much in your work, as bookends around ideas, as the same approach executed differently. How do you define taste then? Why is it important in times like these? It’s such a gluttonous moment and I’m curious how this plays a role in your world.

AL: Interesting question. There's definitely a lot to be said about having a very curated view of the things that you're into. In terms of sustainability, the reason that's a really good way of looking at fashion is it cuts down on waste and encourages you to wear more things when there's only a certain amount of things you're actually into. You can just ignore like 99% of cultural output. We live in an era where there is basically too much cultural output, or too much cultural cultural output that any one person is able to process.

My thing with taste is that it's a bit of a slippery slope, in that you can quite easily end up going from taste into status — and I think a lot of the modern taste economy is actually the status economy. If you look at something like Monocle, for example. Tyler Brûlé clearly has got very specific taste and he's very clearly into what he's into. But Monocle is more about selling a particular vision of things. And it's selling it to an audience that has a lot of money and probably not much of its own instinct on what to spend that on. A lot of the time, that taste economy quite easily walks into a status game.

For me, the stuff that I'm into…it's really just the stuff I'm into. I don't incorporate it into, like, a personal brand or something, partly because I just don't think that my taste has inherent value over anyone else's. And I'm into a lot of stuff that most people really don't care about: I grew up listening to metal and hardcore — and that's one of my biggest passions in life. But the people following me, for the work that I do? They don't need to know which Converge album is my favorite. It’s completely alien to most people. I love reading stuff about Russia and my mum lived in Africa for a really long time and I've grown up around a lot of Egyptian stuff. It's not like I've got really great taste in food, and I could really help people create good recipes: I'm just kind of into the stuff that I'm into.

KRF: I love that though because I feel like that in and of itself is a sort of statement of this economy and an expression of taste, of a point of view. “This is how I view the world and this is what I do with those beliefs.”: that’s such a good salve or a good counterbalance to everything that we deal with and interact with and that we’re entrenched in. That builds trust and it builds a lot of credibility. You do a really good job of that which is why you don't need to talk about Converge because it doesn't fit into a narrative. It doesn't matter. It’s inconsequential to your expression.

AL: You play that music to someone and it's incomprehensible to most people with ears. It's too far out.

KRF: But that’s amazing. There are so many people who do not have, say, the self awareness to go, “This is for me and a select group of people — versus trying to force it upon X, Y, and Z.” That’s so big brained.

AL: I'll take that compliment. I think, for me, it's also about saying no to a lot more things than you say yes to.

KRF: How do you do that? Does that apply to — for lack of better words — stuff? Objects? Be it clothing or needing to buy a lamp? How do you apply that to living life and sometimes needing things? Obviously there's a lot of people who are very swept up in consumption. How do you approach that with this lens?

AL: I'm very much a buy-it-for-life guy. Or, I'm sort of idealistically a buy-for-life guy, buying-for-life or with the knowledge that it is not going to be completely impossible to sell later. Me and my girlfriend just moved into a new place together, our first proper apartment together. That's been this process of buying so much stuff because the place is so much bigger than where we were living before. It’s been this thing of, “How do we feel about this rug? Which plants do we want? Does this color chair work?” It's a thing that feels good in the moment — so let's do it. In Berlin, the secondhand economy is a pretty natural muscle for most people. Everything that isn't secondhand we could sell on Instagram. I'm not trying to, like, get an air fryer because I don't think anyone's making one that's gonna last a long time. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole of, “An air fryer would be useful.” — but when it's broken? It's just going in the bin. That drives me crazy. I can't do that. I don't live like a monk. We still have stuff. We have a big TV and a nice bed frame. It's not about denying myself anything but it’s definitely about buying-it-once. If it's the right thing then you really like it — and you don't need to change it.

KRF: That’s very logical and very sensical. Most people have what my dad used to call money “burning a hole in your pocket,” where you need to go and spend it now instead of having patience, waiting and researching and finding the right thing. We know why that doesn’t happen as algorithms train you to want things immediately, to always be influenced, which is the way of the world now, for better or worse. That might break down because of the Trump tariff bullshit — but it would be foolish for me or anybody to think that it would inspire a complete shift in mindset to what you're saying. There have been so many threats to what we now believe is normal, all of which would force people to open up a third eye when it comes to “stuff. Everything from Covid to climate change to whatever we’re experiencing now, people don't get that there is a need to shift, to reject what has been sold as “normal.” It's wild to me.

How much of this approach is directly informed by needing to be sustainable? How does that inform taste or is your approach an ingrained belief system that extends outside this moment?

AL: My mom was always extremely thrifty. Growing up, she was always very into recycling everything, using the last little bit of toothpaste. When she was a kid, her family didn't have a TV or a car. They weren't poor at all but they were very conscious about using everything and being responsible about everything. That was the kind of environment I grew up in. Also in Brighton — where I grew up, in the South of England — is very liberal, kind of like England's California. It’s that kind of place. Most people there are not so consumerist and happy with less. It's changed a lot since I left because it's basically become a suburb of London now but, it was a happy liberal town where there weren't that many shops to buy sneakers. There were a couple of places that sold Nike and the like — but it's not a big consumerist place.

KRF: That’s great and good that you’re able to share or articulate that. A lot of people don’t have that and are trying to learn.

AL: It just goes to show how it all really is socialized, right?

KRF: Absolutely!

AL: I went from that kind of environment to living in Berlin, which is changing but historically wasn’t the most consumerist place. When I was working at Highsnob, there was a point where the fashion week calendar where every single brand started turning their invites into a novelty product. Instead of having a paper invite, you got Gucci matches and a Yohji Yamamoto candle and streetwear guys would do a t-shirt: all this random stuff. I was like, “Cool. I’ll put it on Grailed and see if anyone buys it.” Every time, when I'd be selling the most random shite, these Americans would buy all of it. It was always an address in California or somewhere in Illinois, somewhere in New York or Miami. I was literally selling Y-3 three sweat bands. It was the dumbest stuff and it was so bizarre, all this leftover stuff. Who buys that? I’ve been to America a bunch of times since and I was like, “Okay, I get it. It’s in the air here. Consumerism is everywhere.”

KRF: It’s unfortunately a very American love language. People don’t understand that being a consumer is so embedded in the lifestyle, that spending money somehow means that rich people or the state or whatever will love you more as a result. I feel like a lot of people are realizing that this year, given all the Trump shit. This is something I say all the time about, say, moving abroad: Americans can’t even delete their Facebook account. What makes you think they’re going to stop shopping on Amazon? The things that you buy become a very big part of your identity. That’s why people go on Grailed and buy your leftovers. At least its a leftover, I guess! But it’s stupid.

I feel like there’s a new vanguard of fashion thinkers who are rethinking this model. I have a few clients and work in some sustainable fashion spaces and there is such a gap between, say, the industry and larger thinking about how fashion works and how sustainability, mindfulness, and impact are expressed. What do you think the relationship between, say, style and taste is with the reality of impact? How do you see these items coming together? Do they play along at all?

AL: Sustainability in fashion…it just kind of ends up with the same problem that the climate movement has a bit more generally, where it's just a bit too white and a bit too middle class and — it’s cliche throwing the word “privilege” at this point but — a bit privileged. There’s a specific kind of person that's naturally drawn toward those spaces. It can feel like a real echo chamber and kind of unambitious. It becomes about every single aspect needing to be perfect and needing to consider every single facet of the whole thing. It can really be about trying to be perfect rather than trying to grow the power of it. In menswear, there's tons of these brands that make products that are inherently sustainable but don't have any certifications, that would never be considered sustainable because it’s not organic cotton or whatever. A lot of those [sustainable] spaces are a bit too siloed off, a bit too much of an echo chamber.

That was why I ended up doing the book that way: I think buying less is a lot more relatable than trying to navigate all the certifications because even sustainability professionals don't always understand all the certifications. A lot of the time they don't really mean anything anyway. Especially as what's going on in Trump's America right now, sustainability is gonna be more and more a moment in time because it's really about, you know, consumerism trying to resolve its own inherent tensions. Then, Trump basically tore up more preconceptions about the way the world works in three months than the climate people and the leftists and everyone else was able to do. He just ripped up! The whole concept of globalized trade: in one day, he managed to kill the whole thing. The world is really changing underneath our feet right now and I think sustainability might end up being something that is seen more as a historical moment, a bit more like Obama era politics or Tony Blair or Justin Trudeau, these politicians who are starting to look really, really old. Maybe not physically — but the messaging is starting to feel really, really old. Again: I think we're going through a complete change in almost everything and all the ways we think the world works.

KRF: The marketing of it all — of a political movement all the way to ideology — has become a product just like consumerism and shopping which has ultimately led to its ruin. I see in a lot of work that I do that it’s becoming harder to reach the people who care about things like more sustainable fashion because we’ve gotten to a point where people don’t give a shit because they don’t think anyone is doing anything to actually make change. Especially since it’s almost 20 years after Obama! And it “amounted to nothing.” That lack of resilience inspired people to look other places and inspired — not a lack of faith in such movements — but a realizing that something else is happening. Maybe it’s not online. Maybe it’s not the black square to support people who are Black and who are different: it’s not that.

That’s a good realization but we’re in the dust after something, waiting. It’s a lull. Something is going to happen at some point: we know that. The world is moving so quickly under our feet that everybody has a case of whiplash. The whole world can’t take their eyes off the crash!

Um. Anyway! [Laughs] It’s obviously difficult and we’re making it work. To me, it feels like this is the moment where people take a hard look to see themselves for who they are, be they as people who don’t have as much means as they thought because Temu and Shein and Amazon made them feel like a king. A lot of people are going to go through that. How can people unplug from these systems? How can they make a difference in their own life, community, or nation? Thinking about being in this dust, how can these things change? This is really complicated subjects, I’m aware.

AL: Just opt out of stuff. There’s a lot to be said to that. Even prioritizing other things like your own happiness and wellbeing is huge.

It’s also an aging thing. Getting into your thirties, into a more adult or end of young adulthood, the gaps between people start to get more and more visible: the people who are healthy and people who aren't healthy, the people who are drinking a bit too much and the people who are fine, the people who are doing well at work and well in their relationships and the people who aren’t — you start to see those gaps quite visibly. What's happening now is the Millennial generation — or our part of the Millennial generation — is starting to see which side of the wealth divide they are on. Some are very, very far on one side or the other. It starts to become extremely clear that some people are playing catch up while others are so far ahead in terms of wealth because they have wealthy parents. You get to a point where people who weren't born with intergenerational wealth and who don’t have fabulously wealthy parents kind of realize there’s completely no point in caring what the rich kids are doing. You get to a point where it's just Succession shit.

There will be a generational shift, where however many people in these high-consumption spaces, will realize a lot of people who are buying all this stuff who weren’t even spending a real amount of money on them because they were so rich. When I started at Highsnob, I had a small view of the world. I remember hearing crazy anecdotes about prices going up and realizing, like, Margiela costs how much? And they’re buying this? Do you know Bamford Watch Department?

KRF: I don’t know.

AL: They do these really, super, one-of-one bespoke watches. It’ll be like a Kaws edition Rolex. I remember, at the time, hearing that the way the business worked is they would go to the Rolex shop, buy the Rolex, do the customization on it, and then sell it on, for like a hundred grand. You hear enough of these anecdotes and you realize that so much of our cultural spaces are being directed at the kids out of Succession. We're going to get to a point where a lot of the consumerist stuff out there isn’t even worth paying attention to.

KRF: There have been so many stories about financial dysmorphia and having personal reckonings of what your financial reality is, which is somewhat specific to people in cities. It’s easy to get sucked into the cloud of someone who has money and who can endlessly spend — but it’s also easy to opt out because that’s not your life.

A big issue is that American context, regardless of if you’re in a city or not: it doesn’t matter because we live in an Internet-driven social media world where, admit it or not, it’s a reality show where America is the star. They’re who everyone is watching and aspiring to be, whether you’re the poorest or the richest of the rich. That’s how you end up with children in Kansas or wherever going to Sephora to buy anti-aging face creams for their 9 year old cheeks, which is also probably happening outside of the country. Those in American cities are the reality show stars of the world.

That’s where this all gets complicated. I’ve lived in the suburban, poor, whatever you want to call it context, where you’re just trying to get by. The last thing you’re thinking in that environment is that a plastic bag is made of plastic. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury to question what you have. But, at the same time, sustainability is second nature as, in my case, we largely only bought secondhand because we could afford that. You upholster your couch because it’s cheaper than getting a new couch. That gets complicated now because desire is a hell of a drug that has you trying to keep up with the Joneses, the Kardashians. If there is a way to take a silver bullet to that mentality, that will be the thing that brings the wall down.

AL: There’s some things in this world that you just have to accept, even if you don’t want to. Again, it’s about saying no to a lot of things.

KRF: I’m no pessimist but, to the point of the post-Obama ideological collapse, it might be time to just let things truly fail, to go to their worst place, to go beyond awful to see the face of ugliness, just so you can build up. I think we’re getting to that point, whether we want to or not, as the machine drives us all into the ground while driving itself there too. It will hurt, it will be painful for everyone worldwide — but what else can cause such a fundamental shift? It’s the curse of interesting, never-not-unprecedented times.

[A big sigh.] Well, to be more uplifting [Laughs.], what’s your recommendation for navigating this? It may not be as complicated as “Go march on wherever.” and could be “Just say no.”

AL: Are we talking about developing your taste, personally? Or being able to navigate this whole moment?

KRF: They go hand-in-hand. It’s more the latter because I think a progressive worldview dictates taste, if that makes sense.

AL: I really like the @Brian Morrissey “more with less” idea. He's put that out as a perspective on how to run a successful media business because media is a precarious industry, constantly exposed to a lot of difficult forces. The best way to navigate that is to do more with less. I think that’s a really helpful way to approach life in this moment. Life is going to be about doing more with less. The pandemic — assuming you weren't suffering Covid and lost your job, assuming you didn’t have any major shocks in your life — was a chance to start to think about less things and to make more out of life. That’s a really helpful motto to take with you when it comes to money, ambitions, work, the way you spend your time, the stuff that you eat. We live in such excessive times, constantly reminded of what we could spend our money on. The ability to be happy with less is a superpower. When you’re in a boom time, in the eighties or nineties, when there was a lot of money in the stock market and working in media, you didn’t need to think about that. Everything was going up. We’re in an era where the cost of everything is going up and the opportunity to make money — depending on where you are — are becoming more restricted.

You can either go into that kicking and screaming and having panic attacks or go into it with a bit of composure, a bit of zen. Honestly, it’s a bit woo woo, but I think mindfulness really is the most powerful thing you can do in these situations where everything is basically symbolism that we’re attached to things, much of which are of no consequence. If you’re able to have that mindset, it’s gonna help a lot. No, you can’t meditate your way out of a really bad job but generally having a perspective where you can be happy with less is gonna be the key to navigating this moment we’re in.

KRF: Amazing.

AL: Not my idea.

KRF: But it’s a great idea to pass along.

AL: Yeah. The way I look at my work and all the books I want to write…all this stuff is about curating and putting items together. It’s not about my take on whatever. It’s about this person and that person saying something interesting and putting it together.

Read more of Alec’s work in his newsletter. You can also buy his book.