Fashion as temporal struggle: Bourdieu,power,and the politics of in/out

Abstract

This commentary engages critically with Van de Peer and Laermans’ article by foregrounding the contributions of Pierre Bourdieu to the sociology of fashion. While acknowledging the originality of their transversal approach, the article argues that Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus – particularly concerning temporality, agency, and symbolic power – deserves a more thorough engagement. Rather than treating Bourdieu as a supplementary theorist of stratification, the piece foregrounds his practice theory and its implications for understanding fashion as a temporally embedded, contested, and embodied field. Drawing on Bourdieu's and Foucault's work, it suggests that fashion should be theorised not merely as a system logic but as a dispositif of subjectivation, where power circulates through visibility, normativity, and affect. Without rejecting the proposed model, this response seeks to radicalise it by returning to the micropolitics of practice, reframing fashion as a social site in which symbolic struggles over inclusion and exclusion are enacted through historically situated and materially charged performances.

Trying to bring together Bourdieu and Luhmann into a coherent theory of fashion is, in itself, an ambitious intellectual wager. This is not because there are no points of contact between the two, but rather because these contact zones are so rarely explored. Both authors, in their respective ways, constructed vast and internally consistent theoretical architectures – ontologies of the social imbued with distinct metaphysical claims and methodological taboos. Over time, their works have generated orthodox interpretive communities, theoretical ‘churches’ whose disciples are often more faithful than the masters themselves. In such contexts, hybridisation may appear as conceptual heresy. This is precisely why the effort by Van de Peer and Laermans (2025) is commendable. It invites readers to traverse entrenched epistemic boundaries and suggests that, rather than rivals, Luhmann and Bourdieu might be co-imagined as theorists of modernity's multiple temporalities.

That said, as a sympathetic yet critical reader – and as a sociologist who has long worked with Bourdieu's conceptual tools – I find the treatment of his work in the article both promising and, at times, reductive. Bourdieu is employed primarily as a theorist of vertical differentiation, a convenient supplement to Luhmann's structural-functionalism. His seminal concepts – taste, habitus, symbolic capital, and the restricted field of cultural production – are invoked to account for class dynamics in clothing fashion or for tensions between symbolic and commercial imperatives in the luxury industry. While this interpretation is not inaccurate, it tends to overlook the multifaceted contributions of Bourdieu to the sociology of culture.

In The Rules of Art (1996), for example, Bourdieu does not merely describe vertical inequalities; he analyses the structured plurality of capitals, the logic of position-taking, the dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy, and the conditions enabling symbolic innovation. His sociology is not a general theory of stratification but a relational theory of practice under constraint. This practice is always temporally situated, affectively charged, and epistemically reflexive. To reduce Bourdieu to a diagnostician of status hierarchies is to overlook the performative, agonistic, and historical dimensions of his theory.

What the article frames as a convergence between Luhmann and Bourdieu frequently reads more as appropriation. Bourdieu is not fully engaged in dialogue with systems theory; rather, he is used to plug perceived lacunae. His vocabulary is grafted onto a Luhmannian frame without addressing the ontological dissonance between the two theoretical projects. The issue here is not merely one of conceptual fidelity but of epistemological ambition.

Luhmann's systems theory offers a theory of observation and differentiation, adept at describing how social complexity is managed via binary codes and functional subsystems. Bourdieu, conversely, focuses on the genesis of meaning, the embodied reproduction of power, and the social conditions of epistemic possibility. Integrating these perspectives requires more than additive juxtaposition; it necessitates a critical interrogation of their epistemes. What does it mean to conjoin a theory of autopoiesis with one of symbolic struggle? How can the notion of code that filters meaning be reconciled with that of field which produces value? These are not questions to be elided; they constitute the very terrain of theoretical labour. Otherwise, Bourdieu risks being reduced to a critical accent within a fundamentally Luhmannian framework.

This tension becomes especially apparent in relation to the article's central analytic construct: the temporal logic of in/out. The authors contend that fashion operates through the distinction between what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ – a semantic device that organises change across various social domains. The elegance of this formulation lies in its parsimony: it abstracts the logic of fashion from material artefacts and applies it transversally to science, art, and the clothing industry. Yet this very abstraction risks dehistoricising the phenomenon it purports to explain. By positing in/out as a formal mechanism of temporal differentiation, the article risks overlooking the sociogenesis of such distinctions. Here again, Bourdieu's theoretical resources remain underutilised.

Bourdieu's sociology is acutely attuned to the temporal structures of practice. The notion of faire date, which the authors rightly reference, is not merely about signalling novelty; it is about instituting a rupture in time, demarcating a before and after in the struggles for recognition and legitimacy within a field. But faire date is never purely symbolic. It hinges on the uneven accumulation of symbolic capital, the inertia of prior investments, and the hysteresis of habitus – the temporal lag between embodied dispositions and altered field conditions. As outlined in The Logic of Practice (1990), this hysteresis explains why agents may misrecognise or resist emergent forms, and why certain innovations succeed or fail in imposing themselves. Habitus is not infinitely elastic; it bears the imprint of history, and when the field evolves rapidly, agents may act on dispositions no longer attuned to its logic. Temporal logic, therefore, is not neutral; it is indexed to position, perception, and trajectory. To present in/out as a generalised system code without attending to these positional dynamics is to ignore how temporalisation is itself a stake in social struggle.

Furthermore, Bourdieu's theory of practice foregrounds the dialectic between strategic action and unconscious disposition. This bears significant implications for conceptualising agency within the fashion system. In the article, fashion appears primarily as a structuring force: it organises systems, modulates attention, and conditions codes. Yet where is the space for resistance, contestation, or subversion? Bourdieu repudiates both voluntaristic and deterministic models of action. He instead posits a theory of ‘reasonable action’, wherein agents operate within the logic of the field, guided by a practical sense that is neither wholly conscious nor entirely automatic. Practices appear strategic not because they are calculated but because they are appropriate – aligned with what the field renders intelligible and actionable from a given position.

This distinction is critical. It illuminates how fashion can function simultaneously as a site of reproduction and resistance. The illusion (illusio) of the game – the belief in the value of its stakes – renders participation meaningful. Yet agents may also play against the rules, exploit the hysteresis of the field, and invert prevailing codes. Subcultural styles, queer dress practices, and ironic appropriations of trend cycles: these are not mere reiterations of in/out but situated interventions that challenge legibility itself. Bourdieu's notion of sens pratique as a socially attuned, embodied competence enables us to perceive how individuals internalise field structures while retaining the capacity to subvert or rearticulate them. Crucially, such resistance often eschews overt defiance; it may manifest as silence, irony, or strategic ambiguity – as Bourdieu notes in Pascalian Meditations (2000: ch. 3).

Bourdieu's critique of the rational actor model, particularly in The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), also bears relevance here. Contemporary interpretations of fashion – especially in its algorithmic and accelerated digital forms – often risk reverting to a model of conscious, rational calculation. Bourdieu dismantles this premise by underscoring the role of practical strategies: implicit, affective, and frequently unconscious. Fashionability may emerge not from deliberation but from the alignment of habitus and field. Conversely, refusal to follow trends may signal not political dissent but dispositional dissonance. These distinctions are sociologically vital if we are to understand fashion as a domain of differentiated complicity rather than as a mere mirror of social trends.

A broader political question also looms. If fashion permeates multiple social subsystems, what are the implications for power and subjectivation? The authors hint at fashion's salience in ‘hypermodernity’, linking it to the decline of grand narratives and the intensification of presentism. Yet such macro-diagnoses risk reifying temporality as a condition rather than interrogating it as an effect of power. Here, Bourdieu and Foucault can be brought into productive tension.

Bourdieu theorises power as a relational dynamic embedded in fields and symbolic capital. Foucault, by contrast, explores power as a set of techniques for governing conduct – dispositifs that constitute subjects through regimes of visibility, knowledge, and normativity. The fashion system, broadly construed, is one such dispositif. It does not merely differentiate between in and out; it shapes bodies, crafts desires, and regulates self-presentation. The in/out distinction is not simply semantic; it is a technology of the self (Foucault, 1985). It compels subjects to curate their image, monitor trends, and optimise visibility. These practices are not ideologically neutral; they are saturated with affect, anxiety, and aspiration – and they are unevenly distributed across lines of cultural capital and aesthetic fluency.

Juxtaposing Bourdieu and Foucault enables us to ask: how do fields and dispositifs intersect? How does symbolic capital enable or restrict self-fashioning? How are habitus and subjectivity co-produced through embodied modes of display? These queries shift the analysis from systemic code to lived power – a power that circulates through structures and affects, through stylised practices and tacit exclusions. Power that disciplines, seduces, and sometimes emancipates.

This may be the most significant limitation one might pose to the article. In its commendable attempt to elevate fashion as a transversal social logic, it risks abstracting away from the practices, frictions, and intensities that render fashion sociologically potent. To theorise fashion is not merely to trace its structural functions, but to engage its materialities, its asymmetries, and its affects. A robust sociology of fashion must attend to the specificity of its enactments and the stakes they entail – symbolic, political, and corporeal.

This is not a rejection of systemic abstraction but a call to reintegrate it with practice. Bourdieu's enduring lesson is that theory must oscillate between epistemic vigilance and empirical embeddedness; between the abstract logic of fields and the historical sediment of habitus. Fashion, too, must be understood not merely as a logic of change but as a situated, structured, and embodied form of life.

In this spirit, Van de Peer and Laermans’ article opens a valuable space for theoretical experimentation. It confers upon fashion the dignity of a conceptual object. But the theoretical project remains incomplete. What we require now is a theory capable of connecting systems and fields, while taking seriously the affective, embodied, and political textures of fashion as a mode of subjectivation. A theory that challenges the idea of fashion as mere code, proposing instead that it is a condition.

Such an endeavour must move beyond viewing fashion as a superficial correlate of social stratification or as a mechanistic protocol of temporal regulation. As the evolving field of fashion studies has demonstrated – particularly in its decolonial, digital, and intersectional inflections – fashion is not merely a surface to be read but a site where power, memory, and aspiration are negotiated and lived. It is a dispositif, certainly, but also a praxis. It is where bodies are marked, norms negotiated, and identities contoured and contested.

To theorise fashion thusly requires epistemic humility and methodological polyphony. It calls for a synthesis of systems theory and ethnographic granularity; for holding together the hierarchical logic of fields with the circulatory logic of digital capital; for resisting the false dichotomies of depth/surface, metaphor/materiality, and system/subject. Fashion, as both field and form, invites us to think across these divides.

In this light, the invitation to connect Bourdieu and Luhmann becomes less a plea for synthesis than a provocation to think otherwise. Their theoretical dissonances may be irreconcilable, but their friction is productive. Luhmann lends insight into differentiation, complexity, and recursive observation. Bourdieu offers a model of embodied agency, historical conflict, and symbolic violence. A truly generative theory of fashion will not subordinate one to the other but exploit their tension to chart the infrastructures through which fashion structures, seduces, and subjects.

As I noted elsewhere (Pedroni, 2025), fashion studies has matured beyond its metaphorical infancy. It has transitioned from lens to object, from analogy to method. Fashion is not merely a reflection of social life; it is a condition of its possibility. The challenge ahead is to embrace fashion not as trivial ornament but as core terrain for sociological imagination – and to formulate theories that remain reflexive, situated, and attuned to the micropolitics of aesthetics, desire, and visibility.

Such is the unfinished labour that Van de Peer and Laermans initiate. It is not an endpoint but an invitation. Let us take up that challenge – not only by theorising fashion's logic but by inhabiting its tensions.