12 The Language of Fashion
certain number of anglo-Saxon writers, where dress is treated as the
index of a certain interiority. This research has taken two directions.
Firstly, it has been properly psychological (in the united States), in the
sense of a psychology of choices and motivations, in which attempts
have been made to identify the hierarchy of motives in vestimentary
choices, with the aid of questionnaires and even tests.^27 But here we
are really talking about a limited number of indices which the psychology
in question has never tried to link to a psychic, or social, totality. The
second direction in this research on the psychology of dress takes
its inspiration from psychoanalysis, in the widest sense of the term.
It is easy for everyone to see what a psychoanalytical reading could
find in a cultural object whose erotic implications are fairly obvious
and whose formal characteristics lend themselves easily to symbolic
interpretations; these attempts at explaining cannot be assessed
without making an overall judgement on psychoanalysis itself, which is
not our job here. however, whilst remaining outside of a psychoanalytical
postulate, it seems that analyses of this type are more fruitful when
it comes to describing what we might call expressions of personality
(self-expression, self-bodility, in the classifications made by Flügel^28 ),
than when analysing symbolization proper, where we have, it seems, to
be wary of ‘shortcuts’.^29 From a methodological point of view what is
interesting in a psychoanalytical explanation, is that the notion of index
is itself ambiguous: is vestimentary form really an index, produced
outside of any intention? Within the psychoanalytical perspective there
is always an (unconscious) choice of an outfit by the collective, or of
a way of dressing on the part of the wearer; and here dress is always
set up as an object for possible deciphering by the person reading it
(group, super-Ego or analyst). Dress, for the psychoanalyst, is meaning
more than index: the notion of censorship lays the basis for the notion of
control in social psychology, just as the notion of sublimation is nothing
other than the psychoanalytical version of the process of rationalization.
It would appear then that the equivalences identified by psychoanalysis
are more factors of expression than indices.
Meanings or Notifications Between the indexical and the notifying,
there may well be mobile and ill-defined boundaries: such and such an
object of notification can come from a previous indexical object—the