History and Sociology of Clothing 9We must obviously be careful about extending this analogy without
due care and attention. only the functional opposition of the two levels
can have any methodological value. This was spotted in relation to dress
itself by Trubetskoy, who established a parallel between the tasks of
phonetics and those of vestimentary description.^19 The opposition dress/
dressing furthermore can only help to reinforce a sociological standpoint:
by strongly characterizing dress as an institution and separating this
institution from the concrete and individual acts by which it (so to speak)
realizes itself, we can research and isolate the social components of
dress: age groups, genders, classes, degrees of civilization, localization.
Dressing then remains an empirical fact, capable of being analysed with
a phenomenological approach: the degree of scruffiness or dirtiness of
a worn garment, for example, is part of dressing, it has no sociological
value, except if scruffiness and dirtiness function as intentional signs (in
a theatre costume for example). Conversely, a less obvious element of
appearance, such as the differential mark in a garment for married and
unmarried women in any society, will be part of dress and has a strong
social value.
Dressing means the personal mode with which the wearer adopts
(albeit badly) the dress that is proposed to them by their social group.
It can have a morphological, psychological or circumstantial meaning,
but it is not sociological.^20
Dress is the proper object of sociological and historical research, and
we have already underlined the importance of the notion of vestimentary
system.^21
Dress and dressing can appear to coincide sometimes, but it is not
difficult to re-establish the distinction in each case: the broadness of the
shoulders, for example. This is part of dressing when it corresponds
exactly to the anatomy of the wearer; but part of dress when its
dimension is prescribed by the group as part of a fashion. It is very
obvious that there is a constant movement between dressing and
dress, a dialectical exchange that is defined in relation to langue and
parole as a veritable praxis.^22
For the sociologist it is obviously the move from dressing to
dress which is the most important. This passage can be seen in the
broadening of a dressing object (with the express condition that this
broadening can be defined as a phenomenon of adoption), or even in
a technological initiative taken by a clothes manufacturer or syndicated