What would Labubu say about Luhmann? Fashion,systems,and struggles

Abstract

This commentary critically engages Van de Peer and Laermans's article on fashion and systems theory. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu, they propose a transversal sociology of fashion grounded in the in/out distinction. While their approach commendably elevates fashion beyond materialist and stratification frameworks, it risks reduction by collapsing diverse modalities into binary semantics. I argue instead for plural and trans-scalar logics of fashion – spanning science, art, industry, and everyday practice – and highlight dimensions neglected by systemic abstraction: affect, memory, sustainability, disciplinary politics, and decolonial critique. Fashion must be read not only as a system of distinctions but as a lived site of aspiration, exclusion, and struggle. Through three media/cultural cases – The Devil Wears Prada, Pose, and the global phenomenon of Labubu – I demonstrate both the explanatory power and the limits of systems theory, urging a general sociology of fashion that is plural, embodied, and porous to interdisciplinary insight.

Introduction

Aurélie Van de Peer and Rudi Laerman's (2025) article, ‘Sociology of fashion: What would Luhmann say?’, is a refreshing and ambitious attempt to reposition fashion within broader sociological theorisation. By mobilising Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory alongside Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, the authors argue that the temporal logic of fashion – the distinction between what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ – extends across multiple subsystems, from science and the visual arts to the clothing economy. Their ‘transversal’ approach, as they describe it, aims to move beyond the typical object-centred, materialist, and stratification-oriented tendencies of fashion sociology, granting fashion a more generalised theoretical dignity.

This is certainly a commendable project. At a moment when fashion studies continues to struggle for recognition within sociology, Van de Peer and Laermans's contribution reminds our fellow sociologists that fashion is not a trivial phenomenon but a fundamental temporal logic shaping the operations of diverse social subsystems. With Marco Pedroni's (2025b) insightful commentary which foregrounds Bourdieu's resources for theorising power, agency, and temporality, my aim here is neither to replicate what has been said nor dismiss their argument about the relevance of Luhmannian theory, but to engage it critically – pushing its implications further while foregrounding what Luhmann cannot say about fashion.

My commentary proceeds in four moves. First, I engage with the article's stated ambition and actual contribution, showing how its reach goes beyond faithful application of Luhmann to reveal the limits of macro-systems theory. Second, I highlight conceptual tensions in the authors’ reduction of fashion to the in/out binary, proposing instead a plural, modal and trans-scalar approach. Third, I raise questions about the politics of disciplinary positioning, sustainability, affect and memory, in addition to the role of public sociology and decolonial thought in moving fashion studies forward. Finally, I extend these arguments through three media and cultural examples – The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Pose (2018–2021), and the global fashion accessory-icon Labubu (2015 launch; 2019–2024 breakthrough) – to dramatise how systemic abstraction must be expanded by attention to embodiment, power, and global flows.

Title vs. contribution: Beyond ‘what would Luhmann say?’

The article's title promises to ask what Luhmann would say about fashion. But the piece itself does something more – and perhaps more interesting. Rather than offering a faithful exegesis of Luhmann, it stretches his conceptual categories, supplements them with Bourdieu, and extends them across empirical domains. In doing so, the authors do not merely apply social systems theory; they expose its limits. The very attempt to address fashion across science, (visual) arts, and the clothing economy shows how inadequate it is to remain only at the macro-systemic level. Fashion is experienced, reproduced, and contested not only in the abstract codes of functional differentiation but also in the meso- and micro-dynamics of organisations, movements, and the embodied practices of everyday life. A true transversal sociology of fashion must therefore integrate levels of analysis that Luhmann – a strikingly anti-humanist who brackets out individual actors, intentions, and experiences – pushed to the margins.

In this sense, their article points us towards what the German sociologist cannot say about fashion. Luhmann cannot, for instance, explain how fashion is negotiated in everyday acts of self-presentation, in the affective attachments of consumers, or in the embodied struggles of designers, workers and consumers. Nor can he adequately account for the power-laden dynamics of subcultures, digital platforms, or global inequalities in and through fashion production. These dimensions require other theoretical resources – practice theory, intersectionality theory, affect theory, and decolonial critique – that complement and complicate the elegance of systems abstraction.

The promise and limits of transversality

The authors’ central proposition is to develop ‘a transversal yet open theory of fashion’ (Van de Peer and Laermans 2025). A promising move it is: If fashion is not confined to clothing, nor reducible to class-based status emulation, then we do need conceptual tools that allow us to trace its structural operations across diverse domains.

Yet transversality is not guaranteed by simply invoking the in/out distinction. Defined too narrowly, fashion collapses into trend, popularity, or temporal churn. What is needed is greater conceptual precision: attention to distinct modalities – scientific plausibility, artistic vogues, industrial cycles, everyday performances – that share family resemblances but remain heterogeneous. Kawamura (2005) reminds us fashion is not only about change but about its institutionalisation and legitimacy; Aspers and Godart (2013) see it as trends diffusing in time and space. These are related but not equivalent logics.

The strength of their transversal approach would be enhanced by closer attention to how these modalities of fashion play out across subsystems. In the humanities and social sciences, fashion (or fashionability) may appear as the uptake of certain theories or methods, framed by plausibility and citation dynamics. In visual arts, it may involve the rapid circulation of styles and names within markets, institutions and exclusive social circles, subject to cycles of canonisation and oblivion. In the clothing industry, it is intertwined with commodity production, labour regimes, attention economies, and digital infrastructures. These are not all the same ‘fashion’ crudely extended across domains; they are distinct instantiations, with differing rhythms, stakes, and consequences.

Modalities and trans-scalar logics of fashion

What would it mean instead to treat fashion as having multiple modalities and operating on multiple scales? By modality I mean a mode of operation: the way fashion appears and is structured or experienced. In science, it is the restless pulse of plausibility, marking the rise and fall of paradigms. In art, it shimmers through stylistic vogues, curatorial turns, and the fleeting gaze of collectors. In clothing, it is choreographed by industrial calendars, retail rhythms, and the swarm of micro-trends on TikTok and Instagram. And in everyday life, it settles into our gestures of self-presentation, the fragile gift of peer recognition, and the flickering visibility of the digital screen. They resonate across domains while keeping their own specific rhythms. They interpenetrate – scientific-fashion can be aestheticised; clothing-fashion can be theorised; artistic-fashion can be commodified – but remain heterogeneous. Shouldn’t a transversal sociology of fashion illuminate these connections while preserving their sub-systemic specificities? And equally, we must ask how these modalities bleed into one another: how TikTok fashion can influence retail buying decisions, or how designer toys like Labubu slip into the luxury branding of houses like Moynat.

Affect, memory, and the confines of systemic abstraction

Recent work on wardrobes and consumption has highlighted how fashion functions as an affective archive – a site where memories are stored, reconciled, and reactivated through clothing (e.g. Almila and Zeilig, 2022; Mundigo-Moore, 2024; Ruggerone, 2017; Smelik and van Tienhoven, 2021; Tse and von Pezold, 2023). The value of a fashion-clothing lies not in systemic novelty but in its role in affective continuity, carried through time by memory, emotional and embodied attachment.

This perspective reveals a fundamental limit in Luhmann's abstraction. Systems theory cannot adequately account for how fashion mediates affective intensities, how it conjures memories that exceed representation, or how it provides mnemonic stability amidst systemic cycle. Without attention to these affective and mnemonic dimensions, fashion risks being reduced to semantic churn, rather than understood as a site of memory and emotional labour.

Sustainability, competence, and new codes

Sustainability is another area where systemic abstraction falters. Van de Peer and Laermans subsume it under the in/out and payment/non-payment codes, yet the obvious distinction – sustainable/unsustainable – is now central, reshaping practices, expectations, and campaigns. In the Global South especially, sustainability is inseparable from labour rights, environmental justice, and struggles against extractive economies. A general sociology of fashion that ignores this distinction may end up reproducing Eurocentric blind spots.

In a recent article, I demonstrate that sustainability cannot be reduced to binary coding but must be understood through practices of fashion competence (Tse and Xiao, 2025): the evaluative capacities consumers deploy when deciding whether to keep, reuse, repair, or discard fashion and accessory items. These competences include knowledge of materials, care practices, symbolic evaluations, and normative judgements about appropriateness, which is exactly where meso- and micro- sociological theories come into play. Rather than merely a semantic distinction, sustainability is negotiated through embodied routines, cultural knowledge, and practical judgement.

Disciplinary politics: Sociology, fashion studies, and public engagement

Van de Peer and Laermans close with a normative claim: that fashion studies should broaden its perspective, align with sociology, and thereby strengthen its academic visibility. While admirable and well-intentioned, this claim raises important questions. Fashion studies is an eclectic, interdisciplinary field. Its strength lies precisely in its porousness – drawing from not only sociology but visual and performing arts, history, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, design studies, and more. To discipline it into sociology may not enhance but constrain its potential. Academic visibility is not guaranteed by subordination to sociology's canons; in fact, fashion studies has often thrived by resisting such hierarchies.

A more promising move, I suggest, is to embrace fashion studies’ eclecticism as a form of public sociology: a way of engaging diverse publics, industries, communities and actors through critical knowledge. Similarly, decolonial scholarship invites us to rethink the Eurocentric biases of both sociology and fashion theory (e.g. Cheang et al., 2022; Jansen, 2020; Pedroni, 2025a). Luhmann's 20th-century systems, after all, were constructed with scant reference to the global circuits of fashion production, the racialised, gendered, and sexually coded divisions of labour, or the epistemologies of the Global South. If fashion studies is to claim its relevance, it must confront these epistemic blind spots – not in deference to sociology, but in urging sociology to unlearn and decolonise.

From systems to struggles: Prada, Pose, and Labubu

The theoretical debates above become clearer and more intelligible when staged against media and cultural examples. Here, I turn to three cases – the Hollywood film The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Ryan Murphy's television series Pose (FX Networks, 2018–2021), and the global collectible phenomenon of Labubu – that dramatise both the explanatory power and the limits of Luhmann's systemic model.

1. The Devil Wears Prada: Systemic Closure and Human Costs

David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada is perhaps the glossiest parable of Luhmann's systems of communication. In the now-canonical ‘cerulean sweater’ scene, Miranda Priestly (the fictional Anna Wintour, personification of fashion's systemic authority) dismantles Andrea ‘Andy’ Sachs – a young journalist newly hired as Priestly's assistant – of her illusion of choice: what she thought a careless grab from the bargain rack is revealed as the end point of fashion's cascade. Cerulean – or was it turquoise, lapis, azure, or simply ‘blue’? – once shimmered down couture runways (the art system), was filtered through editorial pages (the media system), diluted into department stores (the economic system), and finally clung to Andy's shoulders (the interaction system of everyday life). The point is less about hue than about the system's invisible hand: even the most ordinary sweater carries the sediment of fashion's distinctions, and no seemingly individual choice is innocent of that code. This moment crystallises fashion's autopoiesis: garments become valuable not because of intrinsic properties but because of their place in fashion's chain of distinctions. The Runway hierarchy further illustrates systemic reproduction: assistants, stylists, and editors all sustain the binary code fashionable/unfashionable. These hierarchies also map gendered aspiration and precarity: young women sacrifice sleep, partners, and dignity for proximity to power, while Miranda's icy authority exemplifies how systemic distinction consolidates at the top. Miranda's authority lies not only in charisma but in her role as a node that pronounces fashion's distinctions.

Yet the film also points to what Luhmann leaves unsaid. Andy's exhaustion, broken relationships, and final exit from Runway dramatise the labour, sacrifice, and ethical dilemmas entailed by systemic closure. Fashion is not only autopoietic system but lived workplace – an arena of aspiration, exploitation, and gendered precarity. In Pedroni's (2025b) terms, it is a field structured by power and symbolic capital, where actors struggle for recognition. Prada thus supports Luhmann's abstraction while insisting on the embodied costs that Van de Peer and Laermans urge us not to ignore.

2. Pose: ‘The category is … race, gender, sexuality, and class’

If Prada depicts mainstream (Western) fashion's elite circuits, Pose turns to subcultural worlds: the African-American and Latinx ballroom houses of 1980s and 1990s New York. On the ballroom floor, fashion operates with dazzling systemic clarity. Categories such as ‘executive realness’ or ‘high fashion evening wear’ enact the distinction fashionable/unfashionable. Scored from 0 to 10, looks are judged not by utility but by whether they ‘read’ within the ballroom's internal rules. Each ball is a self-contained system, generating newness and reproducing distinction, pulsing with recognition.

But Pose also makes explicit that fashion's system is never separable from broader social hierarchies. Ballroom emerged precisely because Black and Latinx queer and trans communities were excluded from mainstream fashion industries, gay clubs, and elite spaces. Race and class structured access: couture boutiques and magazines were inaccessible to these communities, forcing them to create their own circuits of recognition. Gender and sexuality shaped participation: trans women, gay men, and queer youth, often disowned by families and shut out of formal labour markets, found in ballroom a vital site of self-fashioning and survival.

Electra, the mother of House of Abundance, personifies these tensions in their fiercest form. In the pilot episode, she storms a fashion museum with her crew and strips its archives of couture treasures. The heist is more than spectacle: it lays bare the systemic closure of high fashion, guarded like relics in glass cases, out of reach to those deemed unworthy. Yet Electra's theft is also reclamation – racialised, gendered, defiant. In her hands, stolen gowns become more than fabric; they are seized symbols wrested from a world that would deny her presence in its halls.

Her devotion to Chanel, Versace, Gucci, Dior, and fur coats does more than signal systemic distinction; each garment is a talisman of survival. Draped in splendour, Electra does not merely wear fashion, she wields it – armour against a world eager still to erase her. As a Black trans woman, she turns luxury into weaponry, demanding respect, affirming her womanhood, and claiming a sovereignty denied elsewhere. Fashion's code here is never abstract; it is stitched into flesh, into dignity, into the fragile promise of safety. Equally searing is the bridal boutique, where Electra stands beside Angel. The problem is never the dress but the gatekeepers who withhold recognition. Here the binary of fashionable/unfashionable collapses into something crueller: a verdict on who may be a bride, who may belong, who may be seen as worthy of love. The gown becomes less garment than battleground, its white folds veiled by prejudices that police gender and race.

I read Pose as affirming Luhmann's systemic clarity while exposing his blind spots. The ballroom demonstrates fashion's code in concentrated form, yet it also foregrounds how race, class, gender, and sexuality structure who may be fashionable. Moreover, the houses transform fashion into community and care. Clothes and performance become not just spectacle but sanctuary – means of recognition and mutual protection in the shadow of AIDS. Fashion here is not merely autopoietic but a politics of survival and a utopian rehearsal of inclusion. In this, Pose resonates with Van de Peer and Laermans's call to account for lived embodied experience, and with Pedroni's reminder that struggles for recognition, power, and capital are intrinsic to fashion.

3. Labubu: Accessory-icon, algorithmic fashion, and Asian-global flows

Labubu is less a toy than a storm – a creature that has slipped from the world of designer collectibles into the bloodstream of fashion and fandom. Designed by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, financed through Chinese capital (Pop Mart International Group, 2023), and catapulted into virality when Lisa from Blackpink cradled it on Instagram, Labubu has become a pan-Asian icon of cuteness, scarcity, and style (Pathak, 2025). Fans scream in TikTok videos when a ‘secret Labubu’ tumbles out of a blind box; others dangle them from an unbranded backpack, an Hermès Birkin, or a Louis Vuitton Keepall – transforming even the most guarded emblem of luxury into a stage for mascotry. What begins as a goblin-like figurine ends as a badge of belonging – proof of being in the know, in the moment, in fashion.

Labubu's distinctiveness lies in its double movement between collection and performance. Devotees do not only gather figures but wear them: attaching Labubus as charms, styling them onto clothes, or dressing the creatures themselves in miniature couture. In this play, Labubu is both accessory and icon – adorning its owner while itself being adorned, doubling the logic of fashion display.

From a Luhmannian perspective, each new edition (now into its fourth), collaboration, or ‘outfit’ reproduces the in/out logic of fashion. Labubu is desirable not for its intrinsic qualities but because it marks novelty within cycles of distinction. Resale markets amplify this logic, coupling fashion's autopoietic churn with speculative frenzy, turning scarcity itself into a sign of value.

Yet Labubu also reveals what Luhmann's systemic closure leaves in shadow. Its ascent is inseparable from Asian-global flows: Hong Kong design and Belgian studio practice, Chinese capital and Pop Mart's global distribution networks, Thai and Korean celebrity endorsements, and pan-Asian fandoms (Zuo, 2024). These circuits then globalise through algorithmic infrastructures – TikTok, Xiaohongshu, Instagram, YouTube – propelling Labubu into Europe, the Americas, and even Africa, along with counterfeit versions such as the knock-off Lafufu. Here affect and fandom drive desirability as much as systemic distinction: the shriek of joy at pulling a secret figurine, the pride of accessorising a luxury bag with a mischievous goblin – yet also the scorn of detractors who see only overhype or infantilisation. Labubu exemplifies how cultural forms initiated in Asia can reverberate globally, not only as collectibles but as fashion accessories and icons.

As accessory-icon, Labubu shows how fashion today transcends garments. It is equally about mascots, images, and objects that circulate across bodies, screens, and markets. In this sense, Labubu affirms Luhmann's insight into novelty while exhibiting the embodied, digital, and transnational mediations that exceed it – an Asian-global phenomenon dressed in couture cuteness.

Conclusion: What Luhmann cannot say?

Van de Peer and Laermans rightly elevate fashion as a transversal logic, move beyond material reduction, and invite us to think across horizontal subsystems (Kuipers et al., 2023). Yet their article also illustrates the dangers of abstraction, conceptual overstretch, and disciplinary normativity. Fashion is not only in/out distinctions; it is also about visibility and exclusion, about whose bodies and voices are recognised or erased.

The silences in Luhmann's account matter as much as its insights. He cannot theorise the affective intensities of memory and attachment, the exploitative conditions of garment workers, the racialised aesthetics of global fashion markets, or the digital infrastructures of virality. He cannot explain the structural sustainability crisis, the competences that structure everyday sustainable fashion, or the decolonial struggles that shape fashion's futures. For these, we need other frameworks: practice theory, affect theory, intersectional analysis, actor-network theory, and decolonial critique.

My three media/cultural cases highlight this point. Prada dramatises systemic closure but insists on the human and labour costs of fashion. Pose enacts fashion's systemic logic but shows race, class, gender, and sexuality as constitutive of it. And Labubu, as a fashion accessory-icon, demonstrates how Asian-initiated cultural forms can circulate as global fashion, operating at once as consumer object, wearable sign, stylised mascot, and anti-fashion magnet. Together, these cases affirm that fashion is not only a system of distinctions but also a site of struggle, aspiration, exclusion, and global mediation.

The challenge, then, is not to decide whether fashion is or is not a system, but to take systems theory as one analytical prism among many – pushing towards a more plural, embodied, and trans-scalar sociology of fashion, and a genuinely general sociology of fashion that can stretch beyond garments towards transversal logics. But it must also remain porous to the insights of cultural studies, anthropology, history, and design. In this sense, Van de Peer and Laermans's article is less a final word than a valuable provocation: not by telling us what Luhmann would say, but by showing us what he cannot say, and why fashion studies must keep speaking otherwise.