Abstract
Dismissing fashion goes in and out of fashion easily in academia. This is why it is particularly welcome to introduce new angles expanding the debate. Van de Peer and Laermans's intervention achieves that with both a specific choice of approach – stated in the title What Would Luhmann Say? – and a wide ouverture to what that relatively neglected approach could contribute to fashion studies of all kinds and focus. The article takes us through ways of seeing with a fashion lens not only the clothing industry, its main domain, but also two further areas of influence: the visual arts, and social sciences and humanities. This is effective both in stimulating curiosity for Luhmann and for opening up this relatively new discipline still in search of a clear identity, or (à la Luhmann) differentiation. In my commentary, after some reflections on wider social theory issues this potentially opens up, I take the lead from the focus of the article, the specific operation fashion performs, to explore a little two related areas: first, the arts (not in the sense of how art is also fashion, as the authors discuss, but the opposite, how fashion is also art); second, the body, or perhaps individuality, as the interpretive key of differentiation, pivotal in Luhmann, seems particularly apt also to pursue these parallel paths.
Dismissing fashion goes in and out of fashion easily in academia. It is almost a timeless classic. This is why it is particularly welcome to introduce new angles expanding the debate about fashion's relevance in contemporary society. Van de Peer and Laermans’s (2025) intervention achieves that, with both a specific choice of approach – stated in the title What Would Luhmann Say? – and a wide ouverture to what that relatively neglected approach could contribute to fashion studies of all kinds and foci.
The Luhmannian theoretical framework has many merits, which the article demonstrates by showing its application to empirical cases. However, a main challenge is that systems theory is not easily divided into separate units that can be used individually. One is either a Luhmannian or one is not. This partially explains the specialized, niche uptake of the approach, especially perhaps in an interdisciplinary, shifting field such as fashion scholarship. In Luhmann's own terms, one could say that this theory is a rather closed system that only communicates directly internally; with its own environment, at best, irritations can be exchanged, not specific stimuli that the system needs to operationalize in its own codes. Striking a balance, within a short piece, between basic introduction of such a technical framework and advancing a debate relevant for both insiders and outsiders is not easy. Van de Peer and Laermans's thought-provoking strategy is to illustrate some of the ways in which systems theory can irritate some of the established fashions (as both ‘ways of doing’ and ‘trends’) in the scholarship of ‘fashion’, within and beyond the case of the clothing industry.
The result is indeed a stimulating journey that takes us through ways of seeing with a fashion lens not only the clothing industry, its main domain, but two further areas of influence: the visual arts, and social sciences and humanities. This is effective both in stimulating curiosity for Luhmann and for opening up this relatively new discipline still in search of a clear identity or (à la Luhmann) differentiation. On this the most fundamental debate may be precisely whether the way forward is towards narrowing down, specializing or differentiating fashion as a system, and fashion studies as a discipline or, instead, to highlight the transversality of fashion, and again of fashion studies, as concerned with fashion ‘as a concept in a broader sense’ (Van de Peer and Laermans, 2025 quoting Kawamura, 2005: 2). The authors take a clear position in favour of the second option: ‘we support the argument that fashion operates across diverse spheres of social life’, developing an ‘unorthodox Luhmannian perspective on the transversality of fashion’ (Van de Peer and Laermans, 2025).
For ‘orthodox’ Luhmannians, this may perhaps be problematic – as it builds on an unresolved question regarding whether fashion indeed can constitute or not a self-reproducing (autopoietic) functional subsystem of modern society, a question well summarized by an earlier study by Van de Peer (2016) and briefly mentioned in this new intervention. This indeterminacy makes, I believe, the issue of its boundaries with the environment and relations with other functionally (horizontally) differentiated social subsystems harder to map with the specific tools of systems theory. It complicates especially the issue of whether it makes more strategic and conceptual sense to consider fashion thematically, that is to say, as a cultural and economic domain, or instead ‘transversally’, that is, as a sociocultural dynamic. It also, it seems to me, puts a little grit in the fundamental Luhmannian idea that horizontal differentiation is the defining feature of modernity in all its variants. If some systems are clearly differentiated at the macro level, with a clear and perfectly functioning success medium working with a binary code – the prototype being money and the payment/non payment code, but also right/wrong for law – does that not reintroduce a form of hierarchy, in which properly autonomous subsystems defined by a clearly marked primary function and code are de facto of higher status?
Indeed, this can be usefully viewed from the standpoint of fashion: is the continuous undermining of its temporal in/out logic as frivolous and inconsequential not a sign that, precisely in systems theory, fashion is more of an irritant than an accepted primary function, even within the ‘restricted’ field of fashion? These are perhaps issues for ‘orthodox’ Luhmannians – but they also might help explain why some of the current debates on fashion go straight to core themes of general social theory. I think in particular of the growing contestation of the assumption of fashion as an exclusively modern Western phenomenon, which might indeed also lead to new interesting ways to rethink modernity and its paradoxes (Esposito, 2004, 2017), but also of the emerging lively scene of approaches calling for decolonizing fashion (Jansen, 2020). Overall, Van de Peer and Laermans are coherent with their emphasis on the transversality of fashion, taking sides with those who do not afford to fashion the status of a fully fledged functionally differentiated social subsystem. They do not discuss this cluster of questions – fashion as transversal/restricted domain and fashion as functional system or not, as well as its modern/European ‘invention’. However, it seems to me that they are indeed related, and the answer to one may affect how open the others still are.
Setting aside these issues, which are beyond the scope of a short commentary, I instead take the lead from the focus of the article, the specific operation fashion performs, as well as trying to explore a little two related areas: first, the arts (not in the sense of how art is also fashion, as the authors discuss, but the opposite, how fashion is also art); and second, the body, or perhaps individuality, as the interpretive key of differentiation, pivotal in Luhmann, seems particularly apt also to pursue these parallel paths.
The first – the complicated and shifting relationship of fashion and the major visual arts – is a recurrent theme in fashion studies, again one Van de Peer has helped in bringing to the fore in earlier work (Van de Peer, 2014), even if the debate about the artification or de-artification of fashion is not taken up in this new intervention. I think it would be helpful to take it up. The contribution under discussion adopts a specular perspective: it examines fashion as a secondary code in the visual arts, or in lay terms, perhaps, the fashionization of art. As a secondary code, or criterion of value, the in/out fashion code is called upon as a corollary to the main fitting/non fitting code of contemporary art (again following Luhmann, 2000), where ‘fittingness pertains to the internal coherence (or absence) of aesthetic forms in a strict sense’ (Van de Peer and Laermans, 2025). It seems to me that the similarity of the two codes calls for further engagement with what appears as a biunivocal correspondence between art and fashion, almost – as those supporting the artification of fashion might argue – to the point of fusion. Especially with a transversal notion of fashion, its closeness to art – and especially to art as a generalized symbolic medium rather than as a differentiated sub-system (Luhmann, 1990). Indeed, as the authors also remark, fashion has become a functional equivalent to style, and style, for Luhmann, is art – or what makes art a distinct functional social system.
On this deeper connection between art and fashion, and style, I would like to add to the mix another sociologist who has seen fashion as a surface manifestation of the deepest tenets of social life, even if he is perhaps at the diametrically opposed end of the spectrum from Luhmann. I refer to Georg Simmel, of course. Mostly cited – also by Van de Peer and Laermans – for the infamous trickle-down hypothesis of the diffusion of fashion, Simmel's main contribution to the topic is far more general – even one that could be listed under the heading of a transversal sociology of fashion the authors propose, and perhaps for this reason, often overlooked.
Simmel had made it his mission to unearth how Every event, however restricted to this superficial level it may appear, comes immediately into contact with the depths of the soul, and that the most banal externalities are, in the last analysis, bound up with the final decisions concerning the meaning and the style of life. (Simmel, 1950 [1904]: 412) it satisfies the demand for social adaptation; … it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation … Thus fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change. (Simmel, 1957 [1904]: 543)
The striking feature of fashion then is that identification/differentiation – in/out and fitting/non fitting – are each the function of the other. Albeit contradictory, they only exist, or better, they only work, when combined. Fashion is a functioning paradox, where the emphasis is on functioning – and it is here that Simmel and Luhmann, the most a-systemic and the most systemic authors of them all, seem to reach a similar position: Luhmann's characterization of the function of style could have been taken from Simmel … Simmel did not explicitly discuss the relationship between style and fashion. However, he obviously understood style and fashion – both in their perculiar fields – as making their contribution to solving the great problem of our times: how to unite or bridge the gap between something which is totally individual or private on the one hand and universal and general on the other (Simmel, 1991: 70)? How can an individual belong to a ‘higher’ totality without losing his individuality? One could also imagine Simmel agreeing with Luhmann in arguing that style and fashion are, indeed, functional equivalents. (Gronow, 1993: 97)
One is never completely in or out, but in an in-between that needs both. So perhaps style – as a concept, not as the plurality of empirical styles – deserves a specific consideration in a Luhmannian, and indeed in any transversal, account of fashion.
Finally, I would like this debate also to include a system twice removed, we could say, from the social one: the body. In/out, and fitting/not fitting, are social, that is, they are communicative codes. One of the reasons a Luhmannian approach to fashion is productive is its quite unique, and radical, positing communications as constituents of social systems, not actors or even structures. And if there is an aspect of the social role of fashion that still needs better analytical tools to examine its actual functioning, it is the premise that fashion is a language, a system of signification, a means of communication. This often remains an accepted but generic premise in fashion studies. Now, a peculiarity of fashion as a social system – in the sense of clothing-fashion here – is its ‘structural coupling’ – a sort of interdependency that still allows autopoiesis, as each system remains an environmental irritant to the other – with people understood in Luhmann's terms not only, or even mainly, as ‘psychic systems’ and their thoughts, but also as bodies, or biological systems (Halsall, 2012).
The issue of bodies is a recurring problem for fashion. Some even argue that it is what effectively prevents it from being recognized as art (Yodanis, 2024). In Van de Peer and Laermans’ article, the body is hardly mentioned, even if, especially when discussing the clothing industry, it is clearly relevant. What I would like to see reflected on is how the particular social subsystem of the fashion industry (as a cultural industry – that is, as one that produces mainly meanings) and people in their corporeal dimensions are coupled, or not. Fashion is interesting precisely in the combination of material/immaterial, because it is embodied as well as abstract, and in how that criss-crosses with the other binary distinctions seen so far. Only clothed bodies become meaningful, communicative in society – nudes are also clothed in their meaning. However, individuals also assert their corporeal vulnerability, as various forms of fashion activism claim, calling for more recognition of embodied elements of fashion (Entwistle, 2023).
Coda: What did Luhmann wear?
Luhmann was always ‘well dressed’, wearing the typical outfit of a male academic in continental Europe in the late twentieth century, but also quite peculiar. Those who knew him and official photographs show that he had this down to a uniform made of a two-piece grey suit, white shirts and a tie: either he always wore the same items or he had many identical ones. He certainly was not what today we call a fashion victim, swept away, or led astray, by the in/out logic of cutting-edge fashion trends (Schiermer, 2010). Rather, he seemed to be almost mindful of fashion, relying on an extremely conformist style to manage his own appearance, to reduce complexity on a background of order. Perhaps he had in mind the words, and style, of his fellow countryman Immanuel Kant, who in theory dismissed fashion as ‘vanity and folly’, yet he also recommended propriety in appearance and was known for always being well dressed, ‘fond of silk shirts and shoes with silver buckles’ (Brewer, 2019: 131; cited in Sassatelli, 2023), famously quipping ‘better to be a fool within fashion than out of it’ (Kant, 2007 [1785]: 348).
Perhaps – allowing myself a little speculation here – Luhmann, the hermetic author, was after all looking to be understood – to fit. Fashion is bound always to reveal us as fools – whether we follow it or not (hence, as Kant says, better follow it, as of the two positions ‘that is undoubtedly the less invalidating one’; Schiermer, 2010: 91). If that is, as Schiermer remarks, the meaning of the enigmatic Kantian motto, it can also be expressed in Luhmannian terms, which specifically accounts for why we, people, are always ‘fools’ for social systems: because we are literally outsiders, and fashion is a code that allows us, as psychic (and corporeal) systems structurally to couple with various social subsystems and with communicative codes in general, by making us understandable, by making us fit. This is always up to a point, and also keeping in mind that we do not only need to fit, but also need to differentiate: we are always in-between. And, just to stretch the speculation a little further by generalizing it: perhaps this use of fashion is particularly apt not only if we look at social sciences, as opposed to hard sciences (as the article in question discusses), but also if we look at social scientists.
I could not help but be reminded of the ‘theory of academic types’, in Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel The Mind-Body Problem (1983). I close with it as an ironic provocation, but one that can perhaps urge a view of fashion that in its paradoxical nature, as well as in its social communicative function, can also account – both in the restricted sense as clothing, and in the the wider sense of a sociocultural dynamic – for how it allows psychic (and embodied) systems to arrive at the appointment with the social dressed for the occasion: [In academic types] the degree of concern demonstrated over the presentation of the self, or ‘outward focus’… is in inverse proportion to the degree of certainty attainable within the given methodology. The greater the certainty of one's result, the less the concern with others’ opinions of oneself. Thus at the end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts at all, all attention is focused on one's peers, whose regard is the sole criterion for professional success. … At the other end of the spectrum, where, as the mathematicians themselves are fond of pointing out, ‘a proof is a proof’, no concern need be given to making oneself acceptable to others; and as a rule none whatsoever is given. (Goldstein, 1983: 201–202)
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.