Fashion as temporal struggle: Bourdieu, power, and the politics of in/out

This commentary critically engages with Van de Peer and Laermans’ attempt to articulate a Luhmannian sociology of fashion by foregrounding the neglected potential of Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory. It argues that Bourdieu’s contributions to temporality, agency and symbolic power cannot be reduced to a mere theory of stratification but are crucial for understanding fashion as a contested, historically situated field. Mobilising concepts such as habitus, hysteresis and faire date, the article reframes the in/out logic not as a neutral temporal code but as a stake in symbolic struggle, unevenly distributed across positions and capitals. Bringing Bourdieu into dialogue with Foucault, it further proposes that fashion operates as a dispositif of subjectivation, in which visibility, normativity and affect shape embodied practices of self-presentation. Rather than rejecting the proposed Luhmannian model, the commentary seeks to radicalise it by reconnecting systems-level abstraction with the micropolitics of practice, arguing for a theory of fashion that attends simultaneously to structures, fields and lived, materially charged performances.