2026-2030 | FWO PhD Project
Where once aligned with the old saying ‘In matters of taste there can be no disputes’, taste has since been relocated to the heart of sociological inquiry. Yet despite the concept’s centrality, taste remains under-theorised and under-studied in one key aspect: its acquisition. How is taste acquired? Through what mechanisms does it unfold? And how do children, in the midst of developing taste, navigate this process? Research has largely treated the learning of taste as intergenerational transmission and reproduction, casting children as passive recipients of parental dispositions and framing the process as unidirectional. Indeed, taste acquisition, especially children’s role in it, remains a conceptual black box. This PhD proposal aims to address this gap by conceptualising taste as relational, dependent and co-constructed. It examines the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of fashion taste within the parent-child relationship, using ethnographic observations in shoe stores, interviews with parents and card-game activities with children aged 5–11. The study is structured around four objectives: to explore how parents transmit their fashion habitus, how children negotiate the transmission under supervision, how they reproduce, rework or resist parental influence when unsupervised, and how these processes vary by class and gender. Ultimately, it asks: if the shoe fits the parents’ class, does the child wear it?
