The Fashion Businessconstitute a system of meaning? Man is doomed to articulated language,
and no semiological undertaking can ignore this fact’.^28 Perhaps so for a
semiotician, but as a designer I am inclined to believe that ‘real garments’,
as opposed to the ‘image garments’ or ‘word garments’ in which Barthes
was interested can evoke responses without the mediation of words, if
thoughts are not to be counted as words. On Saturday afternoons when people
go shopping, they try something on and buy if it ‘appeals’ to them in some
way, or in other words, has a ‘meaning’ for them, and as a person who is
susceptible to clothes, I am aware that the ‘meaning’ is partly an emotional
one, or one that often eludes articulation.
If I as a designer wish to communicate an idea, I usually, in common with
most designers, find it most convenient to produce a sketch or a series of
sketches. Sometimes, at MaxMara I am asked to clarify my idea. A technical
description of the garment is usually fairly easy, but when I am asked to
describe what the garment or collection is for, how it is intended to appeal,
words are less useful. We find ourselves describing completely different sets
of clothes using different permutations of the same frequently used words.
So, one theme might be baptized ‘sport-elegante-citá’ whilst another might
be ‘sport-chic’ and another ‘elegante-giorno’. It would be quite impossible
to recreate the clothes simply from the words used to describe them; the
words we use act as an aid, but ultimately the meaning resides in the garments
themselves, or at this stage the drawings.
Of course, we could be more ambitious in our attempts to describe the
clothes. We could pore over our task until we were satisfied that what we
had written fully described a particular garment and its intended significance
to the customer, but what would be the point? The customer would expect
to be able to understand the idea without the aid of our little essay, and
although we use words and images to promote them, we ultimately sell
clothes, not words. But those with an interest in fashion whose stock-in-
trade is the word face a different problem. Writers on fashion understandably
wish to rise to the challenge of translating the garment into the word, offers
her sympathy to those ‘whose brains have been taxed by over-modish and
illiterate writing on art/dress, especially in the field of popular culture’.^29
Barthes describes how, once it passes into written communication, fashion
becomes an ‘autonomous cultural object’ whose functions are more analogous
- Barthes, R., The Fashion System, translated from the French by Matthew Ward and
Richard Howard, London: Cape, 1985, p. xi. - Robiero, A., ‘Re-fashioning Art: some visual approaches to the Study of the History of
Dress’,Fashion Theory, vol. 2, issue 4, Oxford: Berg, 1998, p. 319.