Who Gets to Define "Bad Taste"? Fashion, Social Class, and Symbolic Power

Fashion is often understood as a form of personal expression, allowing individuals to communicate their identities, preferences, and creativity through clothing. Yet judgments about what is considered stylish, elegant, vulgar, or inappropriate are rarely detached from social context. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this article examines how aesthetic judgments become connected to social class and how clothing can reproduce symbolic hierarchies. It argues that fashion operates not only as a system of visual expression but also as a social language through which people are evaluated, classified, and distinguished from one another. At the same time, these judgments are neither universal nor entirely fixed: their meanings change across cultural contexts, social situations, and historical periods.