Our tastebuds begin forming in utero at around the 8 week mark and start functioning around the 14 week mark. Of all the batshit crazy things I learnt while pregnant, the fact that I might be able to quite literally influence my baby’s taste before he was born was definitely one of the most profound. This is part of what’s known as taste imprinting, a theory that exposure to certain flavours or foods when we’re in the womb, or breastfeeding, or very young children creates long-lasting preferences.
From an evolutionary standpoint, taste imprinting makes perfect sense: this nifty bit of biological code means we’ll know which berries to eat from the tree and which to avoid, all because our tiny brains were getting wired with information from our taste buds before we could even detect light or sound. Impressionable little suckers, we are. It was a standing joke with my husband throughout my pregnancy that our unborn child would probably inherit the same sweet tooth that I surely inherited from my own mother, thanks to the sheer amount of ice cream I consumed over those 9 months. Personally, I’ll be thrilled if he does inherit my love for sweet things — eating ice cream is a pleasure best enjoyed rapturously and enthusiastically. He can thank me later.
But what does any of this have to do with cloooothes, I hear you ask.
Fair question.
It’s not as easy — or even remotely as scientific — to draw a parallel between how our mothers shape our taste in food and how they shape our style, or even our broader ‘taste’ (i.e. our aesthetic preferences and instincts).
But when, over the past weekend, my son’s tiny fingers grasped the silver locket around my neck and he issued a satisfied grunt of recognition, it reminded me that he is in a constant state of absorption: every little thing he encounters imprints upon his baseline understanding of the world.
When I was noodling with this newsletter earlier this week, I asked our Instagram followers “How has your own mother influenced your personal style?” Here are just some of the responses:
“She was so conservative and not much “personal” in the personal style. So I make sure to be myself!”
“Mum has an innate understanding of what suits me. It’s her opinion I value the most.”
“Only a love of pearls. Nothing else.”
“She kept all her clothes - and I mean all - and I have been able to discover them as an adult! I’m 29 and I still wear them today and they are surviving from the 60s!”
“Lip liner, always.”
“My mum has always had her own style and never worried about others’ opinions. Life goals.”
“Yes… in what not to wear.”
For better or worse, maternal lessons about style and taste imprint upon us deeply…which gives credence to my theory that cultivating our sense of style and taste is actually just a way to iron out the kinks in our psychology. That what we are doing when we get dressed is trying to resolve the difference between who we are told we should be and who we want to be.
Stay with me! Let me explain…
At the tender age of ten, my impression of mum was one of all-out glamour: tailored skirt suits, Wolford stockings, black kitten heels with grosgrain bows and gold knot earrings. Her perfume of choice was Nina Ricci L’air du temps, which, to my naive little nostrils, smelled like the insides of a velvet jewellery box. I’ll never forget running my chubby little hand along the bottle, which was adorned with two frosted white glass doves. This is the blueprint for sophistication, I would have thought, while my other hand was strangling a Nutella sandwich. Between my first year of school and when I left home, I have no recollection of her wearing anything I’d consider remotely ‘casual’. The closest she got to loungewear was a collection of beautiful sarongs she started wearing after a family trip to Bali. That’s not to say she didn’t occasionally pull on a pair of trackpants, but I simply cannot remember any such pair of trackpants. They did not imprint upon me, if you will.
Mum’s taste in clothes was just one element of a powerful beauty asset portfolio that she wielded to great effect, building an enviable career as a journalist and a fairly extravagant life that, for a time, featured a standing weekly order with the florist and a travel agent on speed dial (it was the 90s). I have no memories of my mother’s own mother — a glamorous actress — but the one picture of her in the house made her look like she was born with Victory rolls in her hair. Certain memories of what good taste looked like are so deeply imprinted they’re basically carved in.
For most of my childhood and adolescence, I was an insufferably A+ student in my mum’s classroom of taste. I happily wore the clothes she bought me, and applied the skincare I barely had to ask her for. I studied the lyric booklets of the Cole Porter and Ella Fitzgerald records she played. The dress-up box she gave me turned into a real-life stack of tutus, and I’d beg to take off my ballet concert lipstick at her elaborate dressing table. At our weekly trip to the florist, I agreed it really should be hydrangeas, not lillies (mind you, I was ten…Ididn’t know why I agreed, but that is besides the point!). Like a lot of little girls, I subscribed to the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ approach. When it came to matters of taste, mum was chronically compelled towards beauty and I inherited that direction like a homing pigeon.
What happened next now seems so inevitable it’s almost boring: I grew up, formed opinions of my own and took a pair of scissors to those Wolford tights. I sat with my best friend while we got a couple of ill-advised tattoos in the back of a sharehouse and scrounged the money for a pair of Acne Pistol Boots to wear with my ripped stockings and leather jackets. And even though it’s a common trope of your early 20s, I think this era of subversive self-expression still came as a surprise to all involved. Was I realising my true taste or simply rejecting hers? Course correcting or overcorrecting?
At 38, the ripped tights have gone, and my taste and style have found a more balanced groove, honed over years of subconsciously and consciously acquiring data points from the outside world. My mum can no longer tell me what she thinks about my choice of shoes or the length of my hair, but she doesn’t need to because I already know. I am not compelled to obey or reject her version of what ‘good taste’ is anymore, but I can’t deny its influence. Those imprints were made on me long ago, like an early inheritance that was put on a very long vesting schedule. I now fully embrace the same fundamental concept she was imprinting on me all those years ago: that life can be beautiful. That a taste for beauty — in whatever form — is a taste for life.
I think about my son’s little hand wrapped around my necklace and his face buried in my jumper, faint with the scent of my perfume. I wonder how much of this is being imprinted on him. All of it, I guess.
Told you…batshit crazy.