ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu theorized a cultural field in which taste distinguished individuals, and people struggled to advance or secure privilege. Taste cultures were linked to particular types of resources or cultural capital and class, which he argued could explain people's differing relationships to goods. He identified a group, namely, cultural intermediaries, who were particularly fixated on advancing its social place within the cultural field and was "interested in how they used the quirkiness of their tastes to set new fashions, offsetting the power of the upper class and traditional elites. These issues became important to both consumer culture and the economy as the upper middle class and their pundits grew more affluent, and also more influential, during the eighties, in Europe as well as in the United States" (Holt 1998, 39).
