Language and Clothing 23majority of cases what was the contingent cause of a particular fashion;
but we have only a very scant knowledge of how the structures change;
for a vestimentary structure is not a sum of items in which a few have
changed according to circumstances; here, as elsewhere, a structure is
defined both by what is legal (what is allowed and what is not) and by
the sorts of play within this legality. historicism has not contributed to a
true description of clothing systems; it considers an item merely as an
event, where the problem is then simply one of being able to put a date
on it. The result is that historical clothing appears to be a collection of
available items, and not an approved set of combinations; in short it is
facts and not values that have been collated; this problem is made all the
more complicated by the well-known uncertainties about periodization
in history:^10 either we describe reigns, as if the king were the exclusive
wearer of clothing, its ritual founder, but this would introduce anarchy into
the vestimentary system itself because the temporal unity of a system is
not necessarily the same as that of political history; or else we describe
the permanent features and changes of global forms, but this can be
achieved only by using a structuralist approach of which historicism is
unaware. This is the unresolved problem: to be honest, we cannot blame
historians for this if you consider that a neighbouring science such as
linguistics, though extensively researched by generations of specialists,
has only just barely begun to confront the difficult problem of the links
between diachrony and synchrony.^11
however, since the end of the nineteenth century, there have
been a certain number of illustrated works, in the form of historical
popularizations, which have tended to place clothing in relation to
a reality external to its form, in short to postulate a transcendence
of dress. These comparisons have assumed a sort of equivalence
between one form and other forms (for example, between two ‘styles’,
between one in clothing and one in architecture, or in furniture)—the
most convincing of these works on this subject is by hansen, which
is cited at the start of this article—or between a form and the spirit
of a particular time, the moral character of a period or the Zeitgeist
of a civilization. none of these attempts ever really gets beyond the
boundaries of tautology: a ‘style’ is arbitrarily inferred from an item of
clothing, this style is then linked to other styles which are just as arbitrary
and then, to finish, we are all impressed by the close relationship of the
forms. We know, however, that a form does not signify anything in itself