Fashion between process and system: A response to Van de Peer and Laermans

Abstract

In this response to Van de Peer and Laermans's sociology of fashion dialogue opener, I will both respond to their call for including new areas of inspection within fashion scholarship, and argue that by including a meaningful focus on processes, not just systems, fashion scholarship can gain in historical and contemporary depth. In my brief empirical case studies, I consider the complex fashionabilities of Port wine in the eighteenth century, champagne in the nineteenth century, and rosé wine in the early twenty-first century. Through these cases, I seek to stress that fashion sociology must keep also history within its analytical reach, in order for meaningful and comprehensive theoretical understanding of fashion to develop further.

Introduction

In their paper ‘Sociology of fashion: What would Luhmann say?’, Van de Peer and Laermans (2025) oscillate between fashion as system and process, leaning heavily towards the former. I hail their effort to make fashion and dress more explicitly two different things, not merely conceptually, as is usual, but also in theorising. I am especially delighted that they chose to use an unfashionable theory to theorise fashion.

For a long time, I have considered it a great pity that fashion and dress get so intermingled in scholarship. A large part of this is due to the institutionalisation of fashion studies primarily in sartorial fashion institutions, in many cases with (high) fashion industry connections, which has made some areas of research lack sufficient critical edge. But another part of this is the reluctance of ‘serious’ scholars to engage seriously with fashion's frivolities. This avoidance of fashion, often by scholars keen to pick up the latest academic trends themselves, is so well established that it feels pointless to comment upon it.

In my response, I seek both to offer a further empirical analysis of how fashion might operate, and to point out some of my hesitations regarding using such a systemic model for seeking to understand and analyse fashion. I acknowledge that the authors use the theory in a nuanced and sophisticated manner in their case studies. Yet I cannot help feeling that much practical, contextual, and motivational nuance is lost to analysis. Moreover, it is perhaps unavoidable that a Luhmannian theory of fashion contains a modernist bias – and that this is reflected in the case studies chosen by the authors. While the authors nod towards fashion history and historical perspectives, in my response, I shall point out some problems in associating fashion as a phenomenon too strictly with systemic modernity, or, indeed, hypermodernity, as the authors do.

My empirical material fits the authors’ call for further empirical analysis in new areas: I speak of some fashions and trends in wine from the eighteenth century onwards. These point towards two problems in the Luhmannian analysis presented. First, it is challenging to differentiate change from fashion, especially in historical sociological analysis. Second, what is considered to be ‘in’ or ‘out’ is not a such a clear logic. Instead, both come with multiple motivations and performances, which are often deeply gendered. A scholar interested in studying fashion must both acknowledge this and get beyond it.

What can fashions in wine tell us?

Van de Peer and Laermans (2025) refer briefly towards other kinds of change than fashion: ‘long-term societal shifts differ from trendiness. More broadly, long-term changes in a functional subsystem induced by irritations in its environment differ from the primarily internal logic of in/out that defines fashion’. When Port wine became increasingly popular amongst British upper-class men during the eighteenth century, the irritations involved war with France; alliance, trade, and customs deals with Portugal; and changing ideas regarding intoxication and ideal masculinity (Ludington, 2009). ¹ Yet the logic was very clearly an in/out logic – even more so, as it involved effectively de-trending French Claret as unmanly, weak, and too French. If we consider fashion as a process (Aspers and Godart, 2013), this shift in consumption habits undeniably contains a major trend that later waned during the early nineteenth century when it was no more considered manly to consume strong alcohol in excess, and custom duties were changed in favour of less strong alcoholic beverages (Ludington, 2013). But if we consider wine production as a system with its inherent logic, it certainly was not yet following the logics of fashionability – such sensibility only followed in the nineteenth century with champagne. Therefore, the process of fashion was very much there, while to analyse it in terms of systems theory might prove more challenging.

The case of champagne points towards another issue: there are many ways of being ‘out’ of fashion. This is so both in terms of motivations (consider Fred Davis’s (1992) elaborate list for anti-fashion motivations, or the distinction I have myself made between anti-fashion and non-fashion (Almila 2016)), and in terms of the performance of being ‘out’. When champagne became all-fashionable in the UK during the nineteenth century, traditional London wine merchants resented the fact that they now had to sell fashionable branded champagnes rather than bottling and selling wines under their own label (Harding, 2024). Men were prone to be sniffy about champagnes they thought were fashionable amongst the ladies (Guy, 1999). Within the logic of which style of champagne and which champagne brand was in/out of vogue at any given moment, there were numerous shifts and changes (Harding, 2021), where telling the difference between a fad, a fashion, and a trend would be challenging. A general trend towards taste for drier champagne can be detected, as well as can short fads for champagnes associated with certain celebrities, such as the fashion leader Prince of Wales (Almila, 2025). While champagne in general was definitely ‘in’ (and on its way to being fully canonised), a champagne might be at least partly ‘out’, either willingly or not, and a specific style of champagne, likewise, could be considered unfashionable.

Ways of being ‘in’ also differ. Indeed, to determine what is ‘fashionable’ can be a notoriously difficult task: it will depend on whom we ask (Farennikova and Prinz, 2011). Indeed, it is perfectly possible to be very much in vogue and yet deny any interest in fashion or fashionability. This can be clearly observed in the trend for rosé wine in the early twenty-first century. First, this shift in taste was dismissed as a ‘fad’, mostly because the consumers leading the trend were young women having fun. As the trend continued, and, increasingly, men started to develop a taste for the wine despite its pinkness, some wine consumers felt a need to make a distinction between the ‘serious’ rosé wines they themselves were consuming, and the other rosé wines consumed for all the ‘wrong’ reasons. Consider Fitzmaurice's (2017: 1–2) analysis of the language associated with a certain style of rosé wine in the prime of its fashionability: it was effectively ‘recast as a serious wine and stripped of its feminine, low-status associations’. Strategically increasing the ‘credibility’ of this pale pink, bone dry Provencal rosé involved ‘disavowing many former hallmarks of the style to emphasize serious, intellectual, and masculinized attributes’.

Therefore, also being ‘in’ might be performed in many different, often gendered, ways. While ‘fashionability’ will increase sales within the non-connoisseur market, those who consider themselves leaders and influencers in the wine world – and are also recognised as such by the wine industry – are likely to want to be on trend without being in the least fashionable. To use the vocabulary evoked by Van de Peer and Laermans (2025), there is certainly both vertical and horizontal differentiation in play here, within the subsystem of wine. Moreover, the ‘traditionalists’ here are far more trend following than the ‘traditionalists’ criticising fashionable, branded champagnes in the nineteenth century – they were doomed to lose the game, as times were changing. Today's wine experts and trend leaders are very much on top of trends, just that there are different kinds of trends and different categories of leadership.

As rosé wine is still on its trendy period, it is difficult to say how canonised it will be, as a drink to be considered seriously. ² But the other wines mentioned above, Port and champagne, are very much canonised. Here, we notice another interesting effect: also canonised wine categories can be more or less ‘in’ or ‘out’. However, canonised as they are, they can hardly be completely ‘out’. While Port wine is certainly not very ‘in’ as a wine category, there are Port wine producers that seek to tap onto more general rising trends within wine production, such as organic and vegan wines. Due to the character of the wine (it typically has alcohol content of 19–22%), one of the major trends, low- and no-alcohol wines, is in practice out of their reach.

Whither goes sociology of fashion?

Just as it is unavoidable for a Luhmannian take on fashion to be focused on modernity, it is probably unavoidable that a sociologist such as myself, more interested in long-term processes than systems, will see problems in a system-theoretical approach. I do not believe fashion to belong exclusively to modernity, nor do I believe it to be so explicitly embedded in economy and binary logics as Van de Peer and Laermans (2025) seem to suggest. While it is extremely important to study fashion as a big picture, horizontally divergent between different sub-systems, there are also numerous subtle human interests, motivations, and practices that must nevertheless hold a key place in the scholarship of fashion, especially in sociology. Meanwhile, I welcome the opening provided by the authors as a crucial step towards studying fashion critically, and outside the established fashion institutions.

I have two main suggestions to contribute to the opening provided by the authors. First, I think that discussing various anti-fashion practices and motivations along with fashion's systemic operations might provide a richer image as to how fashion operates. This allows for a dialectical understanding of fashion processes, as anti-fashion and fashion are always necessarily bound up with each other.

Second, I believe that to add processual historical analysis to the key toolkit of a fashion scholar would be beneficial – here, the work of Norbert Elias is sadly neglected. Within fashion studies, history is too often left to be the playground of fashion and dress historians, while others are focused upon ‘modernity’. I consider this a sad omission in fashion research more generally, and in sociology of fashion in particular. Ambitious fashion scholarship should always draw upon sociology, but fashion sociologists should also take the long histories of fashion far more seriously.