42 The Language of Fashion
makes them clear; it has to do this in the numerous cases where
meaning comes only from the level of ‘detail’ (a necklace, the shape
of a neckline, the sleeve length, the styling detail, etc.). By definition,
the detail is parasitical on the item: the item supports meaning without
participating in it, whether it is by ‘presenting’ it, or by receiving it; the
item of clothing is either the object or the support for meaning. Since
the support for meaning is more often expressed than the object of
meaning, it is the first that needs to be identified, noting meanwhile
those rare cases where the support for meaning is different from the
object aimed at.
Theoretically speaking, what is a support for meaning? here we need
to think back to language. Language, so it would seem generally, does
not have any support for meaning: the word does not underpin the
meaning, because it is the meaning; one cannot abstract the meaning
of a word from the (sonorous or written) material which conveys it: it is
precisely because structural linguistics has understood this constraint
that it has been able to develop at all. however, there is an area where
language begins to dualize discourse and transform the verbal chain
into a simple support for meaning, an area which I have called elsewhere
‘writing’ [l’écriture]. In literary writing, for example, discourse does have
a literal meaning, and in this sense it disallows any dissociation of the
object from meaning, and it is a language in the full sense; but this same
discourse supports a supplementary form of meaning which is not that
of the words that it employs, and whose signified is precisely literature:
by writing a poem I say certain things, but at the same time I point to
poetry.
It is roughly the same with fashion clothing, even though literal
meaning here is defective in most cases: all that remains is the
mythological meaning. In the language of clothing the support for
meaning is to all intents and purposes a kind of sign in decline, the
inert, domesticated vestige of a world where the sweater would
literally signify comfort and warmth, in short the very opposite of
smart. So it is because fashion clothing is part of a double, unhinged
system, where supplementary, secondary meanings rest on initial
meanings that are then slowly devitalized, that it involves these
supports of meaning that do not exist in single-level semiological
analyses.