24 The Language of Fashion
(unless we go back to a universal symbolism of a Freudian variety), for
the good reason that forms are finite in number and meanings infinite:
in any primary formal order, only the functions, and not the substances,
can carry meaning. Consequently in any vestimentary system one is as
unlikely to find a purely historical, semelfactive phenomenon as to find
a purely anthropological, eternal one; both postulations have existed
in the history of clothing: as much as certain writers have excelled at
locating styles historically, others have gone to great efforts, with no
less success, to bring vestimentary variations down to a few simple
forms, tirelessly repeated by human history; for some people, the
hennin [steeple headdress] expresses the gothic tower in a way which
is in some sense irreversible, for others, what is significant about the
history of clothing is that one can already see very modern bikinis on
the frescoes at Pompeii.^12
Through these hypotheses the idea of a true semiology of clothing
is gradually emerging. We need to link clothing to something. But to
what? and how? The historical trend has been followed, by and large,
by the psychological trend. The term of reference here is no longer the
spirit or style of a period, but the psyche of the person wearing the
clothing: clothing is supposed to express a psychological depth. here
there are two routes to take. The first is an already dated collection of
work, and very modest in its pretensions because it mainly concerns
questionnaires given to students at a few american universities. This
work is all based on the psychology of motivation: the idea is to define
and classify personal motives which encourage the purchase of an item
of clothing. This research is barely distinguishable from the marketing
polls carried out periodically by professional clothing companies: the
role of advertising, the proximity of the shops, ‘fashion tips’ from friends,
the effect of shop windows, etc., the hierarchy of qualities required of
the item bought (durability, taste, degree of fashionability, comfort,
etc.). It is quite clear that this is barely a psychology but at best a
rudimentary psycho-sociology which can know nothing of the potential
of phenomenological or psychoanalytical descriptions; the central notion
in this psychology is self-expression, as if the fundamental function of
clothing were to bring together and solidify the self confronted by a
society wishing to swallow it up: it is possible that there is something
specifically american about this interpretation.^13