‘Blue is in Fashion This Year’ 39This amounts to saying that, once in their final state, the signifier
and the signified of fashion clothing do not belong to the same
language. This is a crucial distortion, which places fashion within those
decoupled, dualized structures that I first tried to describe in a previous
essay.^5 now, the duplicity of the system, set up, as it were, as a halfway
house between a language (clothing forms) and a meta-language (the
literature of fashion), requires our method to apply a double description:
the study of the signifieds (for example of the utopian world they
sketch out) is part of a general mythology of fashion. Conversely, the
study of the clothing signifiers belongs to a semiological system, in the
strict sense of the word. I will leave to one side the former in order to
concentrate on the latter; from the signifieds I will retain only their place
in the sign.
- In the majority of other systems of communication, the signifying
relation is not given analytically: the system proposes only a chain of
signifiers, without naming in another way their signifieds: a discourse
offers words, not the meaning of each of these words; if the decipherer
of a language does not know this language and has no lexicon in it,
he [sic] has to operate very patiently, by comparing segments in the
spoken chain, by moving them around, even in an almost experimental
fashion (the commutation test).
With clothing, the autonomy of the signifieds, which are isolated,
detached from the signifiers and hoisted to the dizzy heights of fashion
literature, constitutes a considerable economy of method. Since its
signifiers are given to me with one hand and then the signifieds with
the other, it is as if I was being offered, simultaneously, a text and its
glossary of words; all I will have to do (in theory) is start from the signs
in order to define straightaway the signifiers: defining them is basically
to isolate them. If I am told that blue is in fashion or that camellia has
the optimistic look about it, I will come to the conclusion that colour and
trimmings are apparently types of signifiers, signifying units.
Then, all I need to do to understand the all-signifying structure of
the clothes is look within each unit for those aspects whose opposition
helps create meaning (blue/red? blue/white? brooch/flower? camellia/
rose?). We will recognize in this schema the two phases of structural
analysis: an inventory of the signifying units, and for each unit the setting
up of the paradigm of pertinent opposites; the (spatial) syntagmatic
division on the one hand, and the construction of a system on the other.