Niklas Luhmann: Fashion between the Fashionable and Old-fashioned

The work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has been fashionable in the social sciences and humanities since the 1990s. Sociologists, philosophers and literary scholars see the values of his universalistic project to explain all things social. Indeed, his 'super theory' offers a general theory of social systems. Luhmann's project renewed the sociological systems theory tradition through the idea of 'autopoiesis' or self-producing systems, by which he aimed to embrace both constructivism and universalism. Luhmann's thought in a fashion context has been relatively understudied in the field of fashion studies, and Aurélie van der Peer sets out to show how Luhmann's systems theory can offer a fruitful approach to fashion. Rather than explaining in detail Luhmann's framework, which he has gradually developed in over fifty books, she discusses several key ideas that are central to his thought and can be of particular relevance to the study of fashion: modern society as a functionally differentiated social system, the centrality of communication, the rise of fashion as an autonomous and autopoietic subsystem, the operative closure of the fashion subsystem, and its paradoxes. In addition, she wonders whether fashion operates following its own rationality, as every other subsystem does. This observation has the potential to re-address what numerous fashion scholars have argued before: fashion has been unrightfully treated with contempt.

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