4 The Language of Fashion
has taken account of the social and economic dimension of history, of
the links between clothes and human emotional phenomena as defined
by Lucien Febvre, of the demand for an ideological understanding of
the past as postulated by marxist historians. In fact, it is the whole
institutional perspective on dress that is missing, a gap all the more
paradoxical given that dress is both a historical and a sociological object
if ever there was one.
So the inadequacies in histories of dress that we have so far are, first
and foremost, those that are evident in all historicist forms of history.
and yet the study of dress poses a particular epistemological problem
which we would at least like to underline here: namely, that posed by
the analysis of any structure as soon as it is placed in its history but is
not allowed to cease being a structure. an item of clothing is indeed, at
every moment of history, this balance of normative forms, all of which
are constantly changing.
histories of dress have resolved this problem, but only in a confused
way. Confronted with the obligation to work on forms, they have tried to
list differences: some of these are internal to the vestimentary system itself
(the changes in profile), and the others, external ones, are borrowed from
general history (using epoch, country, social class). There is a general
weakness in these responses which is to be found both on the level of
analysis and of synthesis. With regards to internal differences, no history
of dress has yet bothered to take the time to define what, at any given
moment, a vestimentary system might be, that is the overall axiology
(constraints, prohibitions, tolerances, aberrations, fantasies, congruences
and exclusions) that constitutes it. The archetypes we are given are purely
graphic, that is, more aesthetic than sociological.^4 What’s more, on the
level of the garment itself, despite the seriousness of the inventories
compiled, the analysis remains confused. on the one hand, the qualitative
threshold beyond which an item changes either its form or its function is
rarely stated; in other words, the very object of historical research remains
ambiguous: when does an item of clothing really change, when is there
really history?^5 on the other hand, the position of the item on the body’s
horizontal axis (the degrees of exteriority) is discussed only prudishly,
so that the whole complex game of undergarments, garments and
overgarments is never analysed in relation to their social acceptability.^6
The attempts at external differentiation may appear more reliable,
in that they are guaranteed by a general history with which we are