28 The Language of Fashion
The inventory of the signifying elements of clothing posited here
in a purely hypothetical way has never been undertaken by anybody.
maybe the task is premature (we would need a vast information
apparatus, if only in order to list all the vestimentary ‘texts’:
observations, analyses, continual updatings, which could only be done
by a team of researchers). maybe we should start with the crudest of
analyses about which I would like to make a few observations. The
major difficulty in the analytical deciphering of ‘everyday’ clothing is its
syntactic nature: the signified is only ever expressed in this regard via
signifiers ‘in operation’, meaning is an indissoluble whole that tends
to evaporate as soon as one divides it up. now luckily, there is an
artificial form of clothing in which the signifieds are separated a priori
from the signifiers, and this is fashion clothing that is presented in
both graphic and descriptive form in newspapers and magazines.^17
here, the signified is given explicitly, even before the signifier is named
(an autumn skirt, a woman’s suit for five o’clock in the afternoon,
etc.); it is as if you were being given a very complex text to read, one
made up of subtle norms but to which one had the good fortune at
the same time to have the key: luckily, fashion that is written or drawn
brings the semiologist back towards a lexical state of the vestimentary
signs. We are probably talking about an elaborated language, a logo-
technics, whose signifieds are largely unreal, the stuff of dreams.
however, this does not matter, since what is being sought here is,
first, a field which is sufficiently crude, sufficiently loaded, so that
meaning is seen to be functioning in slow motion as it were, in its
decomposed stages. a semiology of printed fashion must ensure
that it is able to deal legitimately with the greatest danger threatening
any semiology of the first degree: the unjustified objectification of the
signifieds. on the contrary, with written fashion being a semiological
system of the second degree it becomes not only legitimate, but even
necessary, to separate the signified from the signifier and to give to
the signified the very weight of an object. In other words, and to pick
up on a definition that I outlined in a previous essay,^18 printed fashion
functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing:
it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified,
thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing
(one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a
vestimentary linguistics.