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.