Language and Clothing 25The second route in these psychologies of clothing is psychoan-
alytical. For this I would first suggest Kiener’s recent book, even
though it is more gestaltist than psychoanalytical in inspiration. Kiener
attempts to link clothing to a kind of esprit of the human body, as if
anatomical form were the basis of clothing across a series of links and
of distances and the meaning of which varies with history. But, with
the exception of proper psychopathological studies on transvestism,
the classic work, in terms of a psychoanalysis of clothing, is by Flügel;
indeed its classic status is based more on its breadth of information
than on the sharpness of its analyses; it is a fairly eclectic work which
uses traditional analytical concepts within a ‘psychological’ framework
(the motives of modesty, protection and ornamentation); the symbolism
proposed remains cursory and narrowly analogous (for example,
starching is seen as a phallic symbol). Despite these limitations there
is probably in Flügel the origins of two interesting hypotheses: firstly,
that clothing is a compromise between the fear of, and the desire for,
nudity, which would make clothing part of the very process of neurosis,
that is both display and mask; perhaps intuitively here, we can see the
dialectical nature of clothing, in which there seems to be an infinite and
circular exchange from the wearer to the group and from the group
to the wearer; a second interesting hypothesis in Flügel suggests that
analytical censorship actually corresponds to the sociological notion of
social control: in other words, clothing would seem to be less an index
(or a symptom) but more a form of communication. So here we are, after
this brief panorama of histories of clothing, encouraged to posit clothing
in terms of meaning; thus a whole literature, with diverse inspirations
and qualities, but across which clothing is already felt as a value-for, has
led us to this point. however it was a structuralist, Trubetskoy, who was
the first to posit openly the linguistic nature of clothing.
In an incidental remark in his Principles of Phonology,^14 Trubetskoy
suggests applying the Saussurian distinction between langue and
parole to clothing; like langue, clothing would be an institutional system,
abstract and defined by its functions, and from which the individual
wearer would draw their apparel, each time actualizing a normative
virtuality. Trubetskoy adduced as a phenomenon of dressing (that is,
parole) the individual dimensions of an item of clothing, its degree of
wear and dirtiness, and as a phenomenon of dress (that is, langue) the
difference, no matter how tiny, between the clothing of unmarried girls