46 The Language of Fashion
- We can make use of these concomitant variations of signs to
remind ourselves again of the particular structure of fashion language,
of how it resembles articulated language and how it differs from it:
articulated language is a single system (unless we consider its stylistic
aspects, its écritures), fashion clothing is a double system. I will now
explain this difference by comparing each of them to a third semiological
system, an extremely banal one, but which has the advantage of being
either double or single as you wish.
In one part of the highway code I find three signs: red, green,
amber. If no one tells me what their respective meanings are, I will
have to register the real responses to these mysterious stimuli a
certain number of times in order to understand that red is ‘stop’,
green is ‘go’ and amber is ‘get ready’: here we have a primary
system, analogous to articulated language (the message is decoded
only by experience). By contrast, if my driving instructor tells me
explicitly that red means ‘stop’, then I have here a secondary
system, with spoken language as the relay; however, if the instructor
tells me nothing about the other signals (or only tells me later), I will
be led to think that red is the natural, essential, eternal colour for
‘stop’; I will then be absorbing a private meaning artificially detached
from any functional structure: this is the case of the absolute lexicon
(alpaca summer), which I said represented the normal form of
vestimentary communication. But if my instructor explains to me that
the three signifieds (stop, go, get ready) are functionally linked to
three colours whose difference I only need to observe to understand
the message, then I learn a system whose functional structure is
finally crystal clear—though this system is also communicated by
spoken language: for it will be of little importance (except for the
physical reasons of visibility) that the signifying colours are red, green
and amber it is purely in the play of their oppositions that I will read
the information system offered to me: this is very much the case with
my concomitant variations.^13 - I am now in a position to propose a first inventory of the
homogenous types of clothing signifiers. Each of these types constitutes
a kind of syntagmatic unit (what Saussure calls ‘concrete units’); they
are spatial in nature, ‘sections’ of clothing. here is a first list of these
types of ‘vesteme’: