  The gauge sector of the Standard Model (SM) exhibits a flavour symmetry which
allows for independent unitary transformations of the fermion multiplets. In
the SM the flavour symmetry is broken by the Yukawa couplings to the Higgs
boson, and the resulting fermion masses and mixing angles show a pronounced
hierarchy. In this work we connect the observed hierarchy to a sequence of
intermediate effective theories, where the flavour symmetries are broken in a
step-wise fashion by vacuum expectation values of suitably constructed spurion
fields. We identify the possible scenarios in the quark sector and discuss some
implications of this approach.
