The Fashion Businessare obviously neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive divisions, but
they do indicate the key ways in which clothing and fashion have finally
become a vehicle for debates that now lie at the heart of visual and material
culture studies.
Fashion and SignificationThe deconstruction of image or product as text lies at the heart of any
totalizing definition of a cultural studies methodology. In direct opposition
to traditional art and design history and literary criticism methods, cultural
studies offers a way of studying objects as systems rather than as the simple
product of authorship. Borrowed from European structuralism, most specific-
ally the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,^11 the theory of language
“looms as the most essential of cultural studies concepts, either in its own
right, or through being appropriated as a model for understanding other
cultural systems” (Turner 1996). The structures of language, deployed through
speech or text, have been shown to reveal those mechanisms through which
individuals make sense of the world: “Culture, as the site where that sense
or meaning is generated and experienced, becomes a determining, productive
field through which social realities are constructed, experienced and inter-
preted” (Turner 1996). In the most basic of terms, the science of semiology
pioneered by Saussure and later Roland Barthes^12 offered a more refined
mechanism for applying the structural model of language across the wider
range of cultural signifying systems, allowing the scholar to examine the
social specificity of representations and their meaning across different cultural
practices: gesture, literature, drama, conversation, photography, film,
television and, of course, dress. Central to this method is the idea of the
sign, an anchoring unit of communication within a language system, which
might be a word, an image, a sound, an item of clothing, that placed in
juxtaposition with other items produces a particular meaning. That meaning
is further communicated by the process of signification, the division of the
sign into its constituent parts: the signifier (its physical form) and what is
signified (the mental concept or associations that arise). Any meaning
generated by the sign emerges from the subconscious or automatic relationship
of these parts, which is usually arbitrary and culturally relative rather than
fixed. It is a meaning that shifts through time and context, so that the ways
in which such a shift or relationship might occur are of central importance
- Saussure, Ferdinand de, A Course in General Linguistics, London: Peter Owen, 1960.
- Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, London: Paladin, 1973.