14 The Language of Fashion
In any case, the notion of vestimentary signified must be studied with
great care. as mr meyerson has emphasized, it is a limit; in reality, we
are talking about ‘complexes of meaning’, whose equivalence can be
almost entirely free. an article of clothing may seem to be ‘meaningless’
in itself; so we must then, more than ever, get at its social and global
function, and above all at its history; because the manner in which
vestimentary values are presented (forms, colours, tailoring, etc.) can
very well depend on an internal history of the system. Forms may very
well follow general history in a free counterpoint. Certain forms may
be only the ‘products’, the terms of an intrinsic evolution, and not at
all ‘signs’; and there may be a historical arbitrariness and a certain
meaningless in a garment, a ‘degree zero’, as the structuralists say, of
vestimentary signs.
We cannot stress too much, by a way of conclusion, that the history
of dress has a general epistemological value. It actually suggests to the
researcher the essential problems in all cultural analysis, culture being
both system and process, institution and individual act, a reserve of
expression and a signifying order. In this way, it is obviously dependent
not only on the other human sciences around it but also on the
epistemological stage that the social sciences in general have reached.
Born at the same time as the science of history, the science of dress
has long lagged behind its development and now is faced with the
same difficulties; the only difference is that, of all of the types of cultural
research, it has, up to now, been the most overlooked, abandoned above
all to rather anecdotal banalities. The history of dress bears witness in
its own way to the contradiction in any science of culture: every cultural
fact is both a product of history and a resistance to history. The garment,
for example, is at every moment a moving equilibrium, both produced
and undermined by determinisms of nature, function and amplitude,
some internal, others external to the system itself. The study of dress
must retain continually the plurality of these determinisms. The central
methodological warning is still never to postulate too hastily a direct
equivalence between the superstructure (dress) and the infrastructure
(history). Contemporary epistemology understands more and more that
we need to study historico-social totality as a collection of links and
functions. We believe that for clothes (as for language) these stages
and functions are of an axiological nature; they are the values that bear
witness to the creative power of society over itself.