[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 71wanted to observe in all its minuteness the way in which meaning
functions within an object (clothing), about which it has often been said
that it is a language^12 but without this ever having been demonstrated:
in short, given the metaphorical abuse of the word and the price we
pay for this (we are thinking of the inevitable promotion of a certain
formalism), it was finally time to enter (so to speak) into the kitchen of
meaning. and on the other hand, this thorough exploration of the inside
of a particular object (here Fashion clothing) should serve as a model for
a series of similar explorations inside other objects with semiology not
being able to operate fully until all systems of signification be defined by
their differences and their residual commonality.^13 Then, by extension,
major objects in mass culture (to remain within the sociological field)
would then need to be listed, from food to journalistic narrative; but the
analysis of the Fashion system, whatever the imperfections and gaps,
will perhaps already be able to supply a few operational models.
Finally, as a semantic object, Fashion clothing has a fundamental
link to what is generally called global society in that to practise
semiological analysis, however narrowly focused, is to rediscover this
society in all its anthropological generality. But to uncover this link, we
must—paradoxically—accept that sociology and semiology, though
starting with the same object, namely Fashion, develop in two entirely
different directions. The sociology of Fashion starts out with a model
that is imaginary in origin (clothing conceived by the fashion-group), and
then continues to completion (or at least will continue, the day it comes
into existence) by using a series of real clothes (this is the problem for
the dissemination of clothing models); and therefore sociology aims
to systematize behaviours which it can easily link to social conditions,
living standards and collective attitudes. Semiology does not go down
the same road at all; it describes an article of clothing which remains
imaginary, or if you like, purely intellective, which leads to an identification
not of practices but of images. The sociology of Fashion is tuned entirely
to a sociology of real clothing; the semiology of fashion to a sociology
of representations; semiology’s horizon is not real clothing but ideology
in general and within this horizon the Fashion object slowly dissolves to
reveal a global phenomenon par excellence: the human intelligible. It is
not simply via (or starting from) clothing that Fashion goes global, it is
also through the ‘intelligible’. all semiology, whatever the particularity or
triviality of its object, is the search for this general intelligibility (which is