History and Sociology of Clothing 5already familiar. however, even here there is a lot missing, which is
again indicative of the epistemological difficulty we mentioned earlier.
Geographically speaking, histories of dress have not taken stock
of the law established by folklorists in relation to folkloric facts. any
vestimentary system is either regional or international, but it is never
national.^7 The geographical presentation in histories of dress is always
based on a ‘leadership’ in fashion which is aristocratic, without this
leadership ever being placed in its political nor, in this instance,
European context. Socially, moreover, histories of dress rarely consider
anything but royal or aristocratic outfits. not only is social class reduced
here to an ‘image’ (the lord, the lady, etc.), deprived of its ideological
content.^8 But also, outside of the leisured classes, dress is never linked
to the work experienced by the wearer: the whole problem of how
clothes are functionalized is ignored. Finally, historical periodization is
presented in these histories of dress in a distorting and narrow manner.
The difficulties involved in any historical periodization are well known.^9
Lucien Febvre proposed that we substitute one simple, central date for
the two dates at both ends; this rule would be all the more appropriate
in the history of dress given that, in relation to clothes, both the start
and finish of a fashion (in its general sense) always occur over a period
of time. In any case, if it is possible to date the appearance of a garment
to within one year by finding its circumstantial origins, it is a distortion
to confuse the invention of a fashion with its adoption and even more
so to assign a rigorous end-date to any garment. But it is precisely this
that nearly all the histories of dress do, fascinated as most of them are
by the chronological prestige of a particular reign, or even by the reign’s
political policies. In such a situation, the king remains magically affected
by a charismatic function: he is considered, by essence, as the Wearer
of Clothes.
These are the main gaps in the differential descriptions used by
histories of dress. But they are, after all, weaknesses that any broad
view of history could make good. The more serious problem (because
it is more specific) with regard to fundamental errors in all existing
histories of dress, is the methodological recklessness that confuses
the internal and external criteria of differentiation. The garment is always
conceived, implicitly, as the particular signifier of a general signified that
is exterior to it (epoch, country, social class). But, without any indication,
the historian will at one moment trace the history of the signifier, the