26 The Language of Fashion
and that of married women in any society. I would suggest developing
this opposition in the following way: dressing (parole) would include
the individual dimensions of the clothing item, the degree of wear, of
disorder or dirtiness, partial absences of items (buttons not done up,
sleeves not rolled down, etc.), improvised clothes (ad hoc protection),
the choice of colours (except those colours ritualized in mourning,
marriage, tartans, uniforms), the incidental derivations of how an item
is used, the wearer’s particular way of wearing clothes. Dress (langue),
which is always abstract and only requiring a description that is either
verbal or schematic,^15 would include the ritualized forms, substances
and colours, fixed uses, stereotyped modes, the tightly controlled
distribution of accessories (buttons, pockets, etc.), obvious systems
(‘ceremonial’ dress), the incongruences and incompatibilities of items,
the controlled game of undergarments and overgarments, and finally
those dress phenomena which are artificially reconstituted in order
to signify (theatre and film costumes). I think that this application of
the Saussurian distinction to clothing is very valuable; this application
allows research into clothing to monitor constantly the institutional and
sociological character of its object; and, using facts which seem at first
to be ambiguous and drawing only confusedly on clothes and dressing
and on the individual and society, it throws a clear light: it is because
richardson and Kroeber defined the exact sense of the limits in which
the proportions of a item of clothing stopped being a part of dressing
and became part of dress, that they were able to establish, in a work
well known to structuralists, the regularity in the rhythms of fashion
evident for the last three centuries in women’s clothing.^16 Finally, the
Saussurian distinction allows us to describe with accuracy all the truly
dialectical movements which govern the incessant exchanges between
institutional clothing and clothing that is actually put on: how an outfit
becomes clothes (in the general case of women’s fashion, diffused into
clothing habits by real models); how clothes in their turn become part of
outfits (in the case of individual usage becoming picked up collectively
by imitation, fads and crazes, which are so frequent in dandyism).
now that the distinction between clothing and dress has been
ascertained, we must ask what actually signifies in dress. Dress is a
priori a kind of text without end in which it is necessary to learn how
to delimit the signifying units, and this is very difficult. Technology is
of very little help here: a unit of manufacture or of purchase, in short