6 The Language of Fashion
evolution of profiles, whilst at the next moment tracing the history of the
signified, of reigns and nations. now these histories do not necessarily
have the same tempo. First, because fashion can easily produce its own
rhythm:^10 changes of forms have a relative independence in relation to
the general history that supports them, even to the extent where fashion
has only a finite number of archetypal forms, all of which implies, in
the end, a partially cyclical history;^11 and then, because history is by
definition made up of a ‘social time which has a thousand high speeds
and a thousand slow-downs’ (F. Braudel^12 ); consequently, the relations
between vestimentary signifier and signified can never be determined in
a simple and linear fashion.
Does it need to be pointed out that ‘Psychologies’ of dress, so
numerous in the anglo-Saxon world, are not very helpful in this respect?
They leave entirely untouched the whole methodological difficulty of
linking a history of clothes at any one moment to its sociology. The
motivations behind dressing have been much discussed, notably on the
phylogenic level, which, we should remember, have involved so much
fruitless discussion on the origins of language. Why does man dress
up? The relative importance of the three following factors has been
compared: protection, modesty, ornamentation.^13 Dwelling above all on
the relationship between adornment and protection, and taking liberties
with certain ethnographic observations (people living in a harsh climate
such as the indigenous population of Tierra del Fuego apparently prefer
to adorn rather than protect themselves with clothes), or with certain
traits in child psychology (the child apparently adorns and disguises
itself but does not dress itself), specialists have felt able to suggest
that the motivation for adornment is by far the most important factor.
People have even tried to reserve the word ‘dress’ for acts of protection,
and ‘adornment’ for acts of ornamentation. It seems that all these
discussions are victims of a ‘psychological’ illusion: defining a social
fact such as clothes as the sum of a certain number of instincts, which,
once identified on a strictly individual level, are then simply ‘multiplied’
to the group level, is precisely the problem that sociology is trying to
leave behind.^14
What should really interest the researcher, historian or sociologist, is
not the passage from protection to ornamentation (an illusory shift), but
the tendency of every bodily covering to insert itself into an organized,
formal and normative system that is recognized by society. The first