Twentieth-century taste was dictated top-down by magazine editors, not discovered from below

Evidence

In the twentieth century, magazines such as Vogue, GQ, and The New Yorker set the standards of sophistication for elite society, and that meant that editors dictated what the public wanted rather than responding to its existing desires. Vanity Fair’s Dana Brown described these celebrity editors of the 1990s as “the arbiters of taste, the translators of culture and style to the culture-and-style-hungry masses. They decided what was cool, what was important, what was necessary, what made it onto their pages, what people would be talking about, watching, reading, wearing, thinking.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the baseline against which Marx’s argument about collapsed gatekeeping and ‘omnivore monoculture’ is measured — the contrast between broadcast-era authority and internet-era flatness.