Between 2013 and now, an entire generation of brands converged on one aesthetic: geometric sans-serif, muted palette, enough whitespace to land a small aircraft. Skincare brands look like architecture firms. Architecture firms look like meditation apps. Meditation apps look like banks. Banks look like skincare brands.

Pierre Bourdieu explained why in Distinction, published in 1979. Aesthetic preferences are social, not natural. What you call beautiful is a map of where you grew up, what your parents could afford, which rooms you were allowed to enter. The design industry inherited this framework without examining it. Minimalism, which began as radical clarity in the hands of Massimo Vignelli and Josef Müller-Brockmann, became, over decades, the visual language of affluence. Restraint signals you don't need to try. Whitespace signals you can afford to waste it.

A Dressings essay on taste put the class dimension plainly: someone who grew up without money might design a bank logo that's gold, extravagant, big. Someone who grew up with it defaults to minimalism because the wealth is already assumed. What the industry calls "good taste" is an aesthetic dialect spoken by people who went to the same schools, follow the same accounts, apprenticed at the same agencies. When everyone shares the dialect, it stops carrying information. It carries belonging.

Between 2013 and 2020, Burberry, Balmain, Balenciaga, Celine, Saint Laurent, and Berluti all abandoned heritage wordmarks for nearly identical sans-serif logotypes. The Burberry Equestrian Knight, a symbol representing the house since 1901, was discarded for a typeface you could recreate in Figma in forty seconds.

The logic: heritage feels old, clean feels modern. The result: six competing luxury houses became visually indistinguishable. The thing meant to signal sophistication signaled nothing.

Burberry reversed course in 2023, restoring the Equestrian Knight. That reversal matters more than the original change. It's a commercial admission that distinctiveness, even fussy, old-fashioned distinctiveness, is worth more than contemporary good taste.

The market punished sameness. Not immediately. Eventually.

Generative AI tools train on existing design corpora, which means they train on the consensus. Run a branding brief through Midjourney five times and you get five variations of the same answer: clean, geometric, muted, "elevated." The machine has learned what good taste looks like and will reproduce it forever, each output slightly more average than the last.

Elizabeth Goodspeed, writing for It's Nice That in 2024, defined taste as pattern recognition shaped by exposure: knowing which old typeface to revive, which photographer to reference, when to stop using a popular color. Pattern recognition is precisely what AI does best. Taste, as the industry has defined it, is now automatable. Anything automatable is not a differentiator.

Bentzion Goldman, design director at Mother Design, published what amounted to a manifesto through Creative Boom, calling brand identity work in 2024 and 2025 "safe, sanitised, and downright boring." He called for weird. Weird has teeth. It implies social risk, possible failure, someone in the room being uncomfortable.

Consider who already gets this. Liquid Death sells canned water. The packaging looks like a thrash metal energy drink: skull imagery, blackletter typography, aggressive color, a name that sounds like poison. Every design choice violates what the hydration category considers good taste. The brand was valued at $1.4 billion in 2024. You don't remember the pastel water brand with the sans-serif wordmark. There are forty of them. You remember the one that looked like it wanted to kill you.

The moment "make branding weird" hits a conference keynote, it becomes a trend deck slide at a holding company. Brutalism already has Squarespace templates. "Intentionally ugly" is a Pinterest board category. David Carson's aesthetic, transgressive in 1994, was being parodied on greeting cards by 1998.

There's a harder truth. Liquid Death can afford strangeness because venture capital absorbs the risk. A small business owner in a conservative market, someone without a safety net, cannot gamble their livelihood on a chaotic logo. For them, clean and legible isn't cowardice. It's survival. Telling everyone to make branding weird without acknowledging who can afford to be weird is its own blindness.

The real question was never clean versus weird. Burberry didn't fail because it went minimal. It failed because it went minimal for the same reason everyone else did. Liquid Death didn't succeed because it went ugly. It succeeded because ugly was the only honest response to a category drowning in sincerity. The common thread is nerve: the willingness to make the choice that cannot be justified by precedent. And nerve, unlike taste, cannot be automated. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if the people making the choices remember they're supposed to be making choices and not just following the last approval that went through clean.

If this reframed how you look at a "clean" rebrand, subscribe to The Threads of Culture for the next one.

Watch the video essay, Why Every Brand Looks the Same Now (and Why It Needs to Stop), on YouTube.