Temporal paradoxes in fashion theory: A response to Van de Peer and Laermans

Abstract

In response to Van de Peer and Laermans’ essay, ‘Sociology of fashion: What would Luhmann say?’, I express appreciation for their goal of transversal theories of fashion (beyond the realm of clothing-fashion), but also concern about the use of a binary temporal logic of ‘in/out’ differentiation to do so. Drawing on Luhmann's and Van de Peer's and others’ attention to paradox as an alternative framing concept, I suggest that such a transversal theory would be better served by attention to fashion's temporal paradoxes, given the ‘knotty’ or entangled nature of fashion and its relation to change, power, complexity, and relations toward the past and future.

Introduction

‘Sociology of fashion: What would Luhmann say?’ (Van de Peer and Laermans, 2025) is a thought-provoking article that raises many issues for further thought in the study of fashion. I especially appreciate Van de Peer and Laermans’ goal of fostering transversal theorizing of fashion; while many fashion scholars acknowledge the breadth of fashion across all kinds of realms of everyday life and culture (beyond clothing and appearance style), few, if any, have actually attempted to suggest a larger framework to do so. Van de Peer and Laermans address fashion through the lens of what German sociologist Niklas Luhmann called a societal ‘subsystem’. This subsystem, they contend, includes more than the ‘clothing economy’, and argue that its ‘in/out’ temporal logic might be used to understand change in the social sciences and humanities, and the arts, as well as ‘clothing-fashion’. As one who straddles the social sciences and humanities, I have also noticed such fashion trends in theories and methods over the course of my career, so I approached the article with great interest. ¹

I was also very intrigued by the authors’ attention to fashion's temporal logics. However, I diverge dramatically from their (and Luhmann's) binary framing of ‘in/out’ differentiation when theorizing clothing-fashion and, further, transversal studies of fashion. Admittedly, my background in textile and fashion studies, feminism, and cultural studies, as well as sociology (especially symbolic interactionism), does not predispose me to embrace either–or oppositions. For decades, my research and teaching have focused on the study of fashion through ‘both/and’ (Kaiser and Green, 2021) or ‘both/and/and…’ framings such as ambivalences, contradictions, intersectionalities (Kaiser and Green, 2021), and entanglements (Kaiser and McCullough, 2010) – drawing on individuals’ own ways of managing their appearances, navigating ambiguities, and becoming through their identity work with style and fashion.

I understand that binary oppositions are fundamental to Luhmann's systems theory, but I would have really preferred to see more inclusion of his thoughts on paradox. In an earlier book chapter by Van de Peer (2016) on Luhmann's contributions to fashion theory, she had observed, ‘Every system produces its own blind spot, which ultimately leads to a paradox’ (p. 304). She goes on to suggest that fashion theories, as second-order observations, can shed light on these blind spots and potential paradoxes. Somewhat similarly, a ‘knot’ metaphor can help to visualize how to think about how power-related entanglements not only cover or conceal ‘blind spots’, but also complicate binary oppositions (Kaiser and McCullough, 2010).

Hence, to me, there is an interesting paradox in Van de Peer and Laermans’ article: the temporal tension in what could be called a drive for ‘timeliness’ (new, fresh, ‘hot’) and one for ‘timelessness’ (‘canonization’) in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. Although the apparel industry's motivations vary somewhat in clothing-fashion between haute couture and fast fashion, there are examples of clothing styles that have become relatively ‘timeless’ classics (e.g. business suits), often with gendered or classed power relations as an important factor. There are other temporal paradoxes in clothing-fashion, as well, such as how new styles become revivals of old ones (always in at least a slightly altered form) through a kind of circuitous temporality.

In the remainder of this response, I attempt to clarify my concerns about theorizing through ‘in/out’ differences, and then I return to the idea of temporal paradoxes as a potential way to reframe fashion's logics in a way that is less abrupt, more entangled, and more circuitous – especially when conducting comparative analyses in transversal fashion theorizing.

Concerns with ‘in/out’ framing

Binary oppositions (e.g. male vs. female), framed in either–or terms, tend to foster problems of exaggeration and stereotyping, the exclusion of additional options, and leakiness when the two terms cannot contain these options. Worse still are the implicit hierarchies they frequently represent. What are the advantages of an ‘in/out’ temporal framing in fashion, and to whom are they accrued? I cannot help but think that they represent wishful thinking on the part of the apparel industry, especially in the context of fast fashion, which, as Van de Peer and Laermans note, involves new styles in the marketplace every six weeks. Although the seasonal calendar introduced by Parisian haute couture fashion houses still holds some sway, there are also signs of resistance to its timing, as the authors note. Overall, however, it seems that designers, producers, and marketers of clothing benefit most from continual newness – assuming items sell.

Surely, however, the ‘clothing economy’ includes more than producers and distributors? It includes consumption, which in turn extends beyond an initial purchase to wearing, managing through stylistic arrangements, caring, and eventually disposing. A key temporal issue, then, is the lifetime of a garment in a closet and in wear: a time frame that would hopefully be extended in the interest of sustainability. The ‘out’ component of the in/out temporal logic, however, presumably leads to shorter times of wear and time in the wardrobe, consumer waste (financial resources, harm to the planet), and stresses on garment workers, who do not reap their share of the profits. Van de Peer and Laermans (2025) use a Luhmannian lens to ‘understand the breakthrough of the sustainability discourse as a program of a subsystem, which provides openings for discontinuities, while the codes ensure the subsystem's continuity’. Presumably, this means that ‘in/out’ and Luhmann's ‘payment/non-payment’ economic, codes are pretty well locked into the fashion process. If so, these codes not only call for a critique of capitalism's destructive temporal forces, but also make me wonder if and how fashion theory can break out of rigid temporal logics and offer some hope for imagining a more sustainable fashion system for people and the planet. And in a transversal context, I would hope that older, existing theories and works of art, for example, can be respected and yet creatively critiqued and re-analyzed in a way that neither reduces them to ‘outness’ nor canonizes them unreflectively when confronting new contexts and ideas.

Hence, is an ‘in/out’ logic one that fosters creative and critical thought in a transversal theory of fashion? An alternative might be one that the authors suggest: what I would call the temporal paradox of both timeliness and timelessness.

Fashion's temporal paradoxes

In many ways, the ‘in/out’ binary logic is itself paradoxical. First, one can wear clothing that is both in and out, depending on various contexts: where and when it was purchased; how it is styled with other clothes, accessories, and body embellishments; with whom it is worn; and so on. Fashion thrives on a plurality of paradoxes: the desire to fit in with others while expressing individual distinctiveness (Simmel, [1904] 1957), its ‘stability of change’ (Esposito, 2011: 610), its obsession with newness while continually relying on historical styles for inspiration, simultaneous pleasurable and oppressive dimensions, and discourses of both immediacy (e.g. social media and fast fashion) and sustainability (e.g. concern for the environment and global labor conditions). Esposito (2011: 610) argues that fashion thrives by multiplying paradoxes:

The power of fashion … lies first of all in its admirable ability to combine paradoxes to make them work … Fashion shows us a way to articulate and combine the paradoxes with one another instead of trying to delete them – it succeeds in governing paradoxes by multiplying them in a controlled manner and not by trying to reduce them.

As a ‘trivial mystery’, Esposito (2011: 611) argues further, fashion often flies under the radar, as it pursues goals of continual change and profit. I agree, and I would argue that fashion is prone to being taken not seriously enough and too seriously in some ways; it is knotty, entangled, and paradoxical.

More critical and creative analyses are needed, as Van de Peer (2016) has suggested, to uncover fashion's ‘blind spots’ and potential paradoxes. I concur wholeheartedly, and hence I am unclear as to how theorizing fashion as ‘in/out differentiation’ can foster such a task. Though binary oppositions are fundamental to Luhmann's (1990) system theory, their use seems inconsistent with his interest in paradoxes. He drew on the concept of paradox to address society as a differentiated unity (Luhmann, 1990: 409). He contended that sociology emerged in the context of 19th-century modernity, when society was developing different forms to hinge and mediate the past and the future (Luhmann, 1990: 410).

To the extent that sociology arose as a discipline with ‘differentiated unity’, it follows that the sociology of fashion also needs to keep differentiation and unity close at hand, as it hinges and mediates the past and future. Hopefully fashions in the humanities, social sciences, and arts will not become as commodified and ‘fast’ as clothing-fashion; transversal theories of fashion will have enough ‘contextual flexibility’ (Kaiser et al., 1993) to grapple, interpret, and reinterpret paradox without attempting to solve its riddles too quickly or simplistically; theorists and artists can build on the past with a kind of critical respect, while also imagining new, open-ended, and promising futures.

Many thanks to Van de Peer and Laermans for their provocation toward a transversal theory of fashion. Their article certainly got my attention and made me think, to do more reading in unexpected places, and to speculate. There are issues raised in the article that I hope to engage with further, and I look forward to a productive dialogue in the sociology of fashion and critical, interdisciplinary fashion studies alike.