From Books To Beauty, Why Recommendations Are The New Status Symbol

My partner had planned it: a Friday-night date night at the Italian on the corner of our road in a residential area of north London. The restaurant in question is one of those unassuming places with cafe curtains and flickering candles in the middle of wonky wooden tables. It is small and neatly tucked away off the main sprawl of the high street, a detail that feels important because it lends itself to the fact that you just have to know about this restaurant. It is simply not something you fall upon; it is something you seek. Yet on this date night in question, it turned out that this tiny Italian had been sought by huge swathes of very cool young people, who had unearthed it by way of a popular west Londoner’s Substack.

The same thing happened a few months prior on a visit to New York, where an all-American diner called Bernie’s in Williamsburg proved impossible to get a reservation at, as queues of hungry customers snaked around the block to try and snag a table. For months, members of the social media cognoscenti had been declaring it ‘The coolest restaurant in Brooklyn'. The ripples of recommendation culture were found lapping at Asian shores months prior to that, too, when I was unable to get a spur-of-the-moment table at a restaurant in Seoul that people had implored me to visit. I'd been told it was a local’s favourite with a whiff of if-you-know-you-know intrigue. It turns out that in the age of digital media, there’s no longer such a thing as a local’s favourite. Make no mistake, we are in the grips of a recommendation frenzy where all of us — every last one of us, including you — are living our lives according to tasteful tip-offs.

And while we know so much more about what everyone is doing, eating, wearing all of the time, there's a pressure to optimise our own lives; to make sure we're spending the, often limited, time we do have only going to the best restaurants, wearing the comfiest tried-and-tested ballet flats and reading recommended books that stretch our intellect. To beat consumption fatigue and cut through the deluge of information, a strong, curated list from a trusted, invite-only source holds more weight and value than ever before. That's precisely where the plethora of IYKYK newsletters and social media accounts comes into play, which are driving the golden age of recommendations.

People want to know what to want, think, feel and buy so much that they’re now willing to join waiting lists to be admitted to certain IYKYK communities. Among those leading the tasteful charge are Spittle, the London art scene's answer to Lady Whistledown's gossip rag and known as the city's most anarchic art newsletter, which is run by a collective, whose anonymity allows them the freedom to say what they want. To gauge the hype around these IYKYK missives, you don't have to look further than Opulent Tips, 'the internet's first shopping newsletter', founded and written by fashion critic Rachel Tashijan, which now has over 10,000 subscribers, with the list of people waiting to be admitted as subscribers growing by the day. ‘A couple of years ago, people became really obsessed with blaming everything on the algorithm. You know, the idea that we’re seeing what we're seeing in movies and TV and fashion and books, because the algorithm wants us to see it. And as a result of that, I think people became very obsessed with this idea of having taste, almost in direct opposition to the algorithm, which can’t have taste,’ Tashjian explains.

Before social media, the primary arbiters of taste were magazine editors who used the pages of their publications to state what constituted a good and tasteful life. Their words lent clout to everything, from which opinions were interesting to which celebrities were nascent. Then digital media exploded, and suddenly those recommendations were all over Instagram captions, social media videos, Substack newsletters, paid partnerships and advertisements.

According to research from Deloitte, approximately 59% of Gen Z often watch TV shows or films after hearing about them from content creators, with a similar percentage admitting to having been influenced to watch a film in cinemas due to social media buzz. Social media’s #BookTok, a hashtag under which users create content talking about books, has over 370 billion views as of 2025, while platforms like Letterboxd have exploded, with the social network for film buffs experiencing a 500% growth rate between 2020-2024. It’s happening with travel too; with over half (53%) of Gen Z travellers using social media platforms for leisure travel recommendations. In a now-viral Substack published in March 2024, Alison Roman posited: ‘For the departments I’m not an expert in, I prefer to hear from someone that is. If it can be recommended, we (I) want the recommendation. We want to know where they’re eating. The perfect black blazer. Where to stay in Greece. Recommendations that will presumably save us from wasting time or money, two things we hate to do. Efficiency…now that, we love! The people need to know. We all want to know. I want to know!’

Indeed, while recommendations themselves have proliferated, in the age of algorithms and abundance, it is now taste that has the highest currency of all. Anybody can recommend, but not everybody has taste, which is precisely the sentiment that inspired Alexia Tamer to found AmiGo, a curated, invite-only app for niche and local travel recommendations, which counts interiors influencer Lucy Williams, content creator Chrissy Rutherford and designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh as contributors. ‘It's become easier for everybody to share, and so now that everyone's doing it and there’s so much information, there’s more clutter, and that’s created a desire for unique, tailored, and personal recommendations,’ says Tamer. The premise of AmiGo is to lend recommending an air of intimacy and specialism from tastemakers you can trust: Williams posts about Melisses, an idyllic boutique hotel in Andros, Greece, while Nassir Zadeh shares La Lagunilla, a Sunday-only bazaar in Mexico City.

The rise of online recommendations comes in the wake of what Lewis Casey, a former magazine writer and author of the After School Substack newsletter, which has over 77,000 subscribers, calls the 'affiliate engine' that has become the lifeblood of the media ecosystem. People have become wise to the affiliate ‘kick-back’ that media outlets get if they recommend certain brands or certain products, therefore weakening trust with readers. Now that consumers understand the nature of paid content, advertorials and advertisements, they have in turn become more discerning about which recommendations they feel are genuine and which are not. That is precisely where taste comes in. ‘Social media can propel relative unknowns, and because of the way that you scroll through the feed, when you see somebody, you don't investigate them to see if they're paid,’ explains Lewis. ‘You don’t think “Is this just an ad?” You think, “Is this a cool person? They seem to have a good taste level; I’m interested in what they’re sharing. I’m just going to take it at face value.” We find creators who align with what we're interested in, and then we trust them, without too much interrogation.’

Substack, the publishing platform founded in 2017 that specialises in user-generated newsletters, has proven itself to be a key conduit for creators looking to develop trust with their audiences. The newsletters that its estimated 20 million monthly active subscribers write, send and receive are fertile ground for human-curated guidance. At a time when tyrannical algorithms and AI can flood social media feeds with often indistinguishable content, Substack newsletters offer a proof of life. They remind consumers that a real person is behind the text they’re reading and the recommendations they’re metabolising.

Two brands that have become emblematic of the online recommendation cottage industry, and prove that content containing recommendations is what people want, are Perfectly Imperfect, a counter-cultural recommendation newsletter founded in 2020, and Dream Baby Press, an online literature community whose irreverent love/hate lists that it shares with its almost 40,000 Instagram followers have become a mainstay of its brand. While the calibre of 'It' girls, including Pink Pantheress and Sam Fragoso, that both brands feature alongside their personal recommendations are known among certain circles, they’re not A-listers — but therein lies their power. The taste economy today has come to be fuelled by people on the periphery, but whose tastes and aesthetic resonate with ours and whose recommendations we probably haven't heard of.

Yet sharing online recommendations presents a dichotomy: if divulging to the masses increases the popularity of said recommendation, taking it from countercultural currency to the mainstream, then are we inevitably due to return to a pre-2010s era of gatekeeping? In a now-viral March 2024 interview with The Cut, Laura Harrier noted, ‘Controversial opinion, but I feel like we need to go back to gatekeeping. Everyone is sharing way too much information. We’ve all worked hard to find places and a distinct style, and I don’t think it should be given out on the internet all the time.’ Harrier has a point — and given that some recommendations have led to places being completely overrun with people, authorities are now taking steps to counterbalance the phenomenon. In May 2025, Spanish authorities in the Balearic Islands announced that they will stop using social media influencers to promote popular destinations, noting that ‘selfie tourism’ was damaging some of its most treasured locations. ‘I’m no longer excited about finding things anymore when a Substacker gets too big, because I know that this is now the new mainstream. It's funny because it's as though we're trying to be the only one in our friend group who follows certain things or knows about certain things,’ Gyllander posits. ‘I don't think that the kind of influencer that just does paid sponsorships is the future of the creator economy.’

Not everybody is pro-gatekeeping. In response to Harrier’s proliferated quotes, writer Otegha Uwagba mused in her own Substack a response to the actors’ rallying cry for a return to gatekeeping. ‘I feel on some deep instinctual level that gatekeeping feels quite… immature? Like - I went to a girls’ school for 7 years of my life and if there’s one thing that teenage girls like doing, it’s gatekeeping where they got that bag/shoes/jeans from!! (The answer was always Urban Outfitters),’ Uwagba wrote, adding, ‘there’s a desire these days to skip the steps that go into cultivating taste (or opinions – a topic for another day), with people seemingly failing to realise that organic discovery, the process of actually acquiring those tastes, is actually part of what makes experiencing them satisfying.’

In part, Lewis suggests, the saturation of social media created cache around knowing things that other people didn’t. Yet there is a finite number of restaurants, destinations and brands in the world, so is it inevitable that recommendations will eventually come to cannibalise themselves? Everything is cyclical, Tamer notes. ‘The more people recommend on social media and on Instagram, the more meaningless it'll eventually become. So, I think that we're going to see a rise of new media that is going to be able to find smarter ways to curate and provide recommendations for people.’

I'm pleased to report that the popularity of my local Italian has waned; there are newer, cooler, buzzier Italians in London that the masses are now flocking to. Somebody with a following — who I knew would post their every move — visited London recently and when they asked me for an Italian recommendation, despite the abundant oversharing mindset I have always had, I found myself pausing and, shamelessly, recommending an overexposed Italian in the next borough. Yes, I have erected a gate to keep the things that I love from being ruined. And no, I’m not ashamed to admit it.

ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well as the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today.

Read the original article in ELLE UK.