Showing How Rhetoric Works 109or incomplete, appearance of the visible forms; this wording therefore
constitutes the moment when what is hidden becomes visible, in which
one can almost see, in a secularized form, the sacred halo of divinatory
texts; all the more since the knowledge of Fashion never comes without
a price; it holds a sanction for those who are excluded from it: the stigma
of being unfashionable.
Pseudo-syntax
Indeed, without leaving behind the actual line of the words (since this
guarantees the meaning of an item of clothing), we can try and replace the
grammatical links (which themselves are charged with no vestimentary
meaning) with a pseudo-syntax, whose articulations, removed from
grammar, will have the sole aim of making manifest a vestimentary
meaning, and no longer something to be understood within discourse.
The support for meaning
in fashion
materiality, inertia and conductivity all make the support for meaning
into an original element in the Fashion system, at least in relation to
language. Indeed, language has nothing about it which would resemble
a support for meaning (.. .) so one cannot divide the linguistic syntagm
into active, meaningful elements and inert, meaningless elements: in
language everything means. The necessity and originality of the support
for meaning reside precisely in the fact that clothing is not in itself a
system of meaning, as language is; in terms of substance, the support
represents the materiality of the item of clothing, as it exists outside of
any process of meaning.
Rhetoric of the
observation of fact
Fashion sits at the crossroads between chance and divine decree:
its decisions become a self-evident fact. all Fashion then has to do is