34 The Language of Fashion
withstand such structuration. For what interests us in items of clothing
is essentially the links between them; what we need is a description
that is more functional than substantial. now the example of linguistics
(and especially phonology) suggests that we cannot describe a reality
as a structure unless we modify the very idea of those phenomena that
compete with each other to form a function: phonological ‘phenomena’
are very different from phonetic ‘phenomena’. The day when the study of
clothing moves from, shall I say, the lexical to the syntactical, is the day
when the majority of the ‘phenomena’ collected by the psychology of
clothing will be useless because they will suddenly have no meaning.
Notes
1 Published in Annales, march–april 1960, 404–7; Oeuvres complètes
vol. 1, 853–5. a review of Fr. Kiener, Le Vêtement, la mode et l’homme.
Essai d’interprétation psychologique.
2 Annales 3, July–September 1957, 741–52. [See chapter 1 here, ‘history
and Sociology of Clothing. Some methodological observations’].
3 F. Kiener, Le Vêtement, la mode et l’homme. Essai d’interprétation
psychologique, munich: reinhardt, 1956.
4 J.-C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, London, hogarth Press, 3rd
edition, 1950.
5 Kiener considers his research to be part of the ‘science of expression’
(Ausdruckskunde).
6 aiming to describe clothing from a technological point of view, andré
Leroi-Gourhan was right to adopt a classification system based not on the
parts of the body but where the items rested (Milieu et techniques, Paris,
albin michel, 1950 [1945] [see the chapter ‘le vêtement’, 209–53, with
ample illustrations by Leroi-Gourhan].
7 When Kiener defines ornamentation as a ‘role’ (I am what I make of
myself), he is proposing a very rich line of research which could benefit
from certain developments in phenomenology (there are certain elements
of this in Sartre’s Saint Genet) and in psychopathology (I am thinking in
particular of roland Kuhn, Phénoménologie du masque. A travers le test
de Rorschach, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1957 [trans. from German
by Jacqueline verdeaux, with a preface by Gaston Bachelard; it uses
rorschach’s test in which patients are asked to draw and identify faces to
reveal psychological disorders and traits]). Kiener makes another, much
more interesting, point about the intellectual ‘role’ of the person who
wears glasses.