8 The Language of Fashion
change in unequal measure. This difficulty has been encountered at
least, and in part resolved, by linguistics. Since Saussure, we know that
language, like dress, is both a system and a history, an individual act and
a collective institution. Language and dress are, at any moment in history,
complete structures, constituted organically by a functional network of
norms and forms; and the transformation or displacement of any one
element can modify the whole, producing a new structure: so, inevitably,
we are talking about a collection of balances in movement, of institutions in
flux. Without wanting to get into the argument over structuralism here, it is
impossible to deny the central problem. This is not to say that the problem
can be solved identically, in both linguistics and dress history. But at least
we can expect contemporary linguistics to provide the study of dress
with outlines, materials and terms for reflection that have been developed
over the last fifty years or so. Therefore we must quickly examine the
methodological effects of Saussurian models on studies of dress.^17
Langue and parole, dress
and dressing
We know that for Saussure human language can be studied from
two directions, that of langue and that of parole. Langue is the social
institution, independent of the individual; it is a normative reserve from
which the individual draws their parole, ‘a virtual system that is actualized
only in and through parole’. Parole is the individual act, ‘an actualized
manifestation of the function of langage’, langage being a generic term
for both langue and parole.^18 It seems to be extremely useful, by way of
an analogy to clothing, to identify an institutional, fundamentally social,
reality, which, independent of the individual, is like the systematic,
normative reserve from which the individual draws their own clothing,
and which, in correspondence to Saussure’s langue, we propose to
call dress. and then to distinguish this from a second, individual reality,
the very act of ‘getting dressed’, in which the individual actualizes on
their body the general inscription of dress, and which, corresponding to
Saussure’s parole, we will call dressing. Dress and dressing form then
a generic whole, for which we propose to retain the word clothing (this
is langage for Saussure).