The Language of Fashion

37

Chapter 4

‘Blue is in Fashion

This Year’: A Note on

Research into Signifying

Units in Fashion Clothing

1

1. When I read in a fashion magazine that the accessory makes
   springtime, that this women’s suit (of which I have a photograph in front
   of me) has a young and slinky look, or that blue is in fashion this year,
   I cannot but see a semantic structure in these suggestions: in every
   case, and whatever the metaphorical detours taken by the wording, I
   see imposed upon me a link of equivalence between a concept (spring,
   youth, fashion this year) and a form (the accessory, this suit, the colour
   blue), between a signified and a signifier.
   of course, we are not talking about a rigorous production of meaning:
   the link is neither obligatory nor sufficiently motivated. If it is suggested
   to me: for a teatime dance at Juan-les-Pins, a lavish, straight neckline,
   or for a lunchtime party in Deauville, a soft canezou, we have here a
   doubly feeble link—the teatime dance does not require such a neckline,
   nor the normandy lunch a canezou. nevertheless, there is an expressive
   affinity between the two terms in the link I make, the beginnings of a
   tautology: one term calls for the other, the link is like a quotation. at the
   very least I can see that there is meaning between them; it is almost as
   if the fashion magazine were linking a certain domain (a daytime party,