18 The Language of Fashion
outfit); choice of colours (except for ritualized colours: mourning, marriage,
uniforms, tartans, etc.); (7) circumstantial derivations for an item’s
deployment; (8) non-stereotyped acts of usage particular to the wearer;
(9) anomalies, or allowances, in the dress object.
21 We can now suggest the following refinements:
I. Garments: (1) forms, substances, formalized or ritualized colours;
(2) fixed circumstantial usage; (3) stereotyped acts of dressing;
(4) particular ways of wearing a garment; (5) distribution of accessories
(pockets, buttons, etc.).
II. Systems or arrangements: (1) apparent global system (‘uniform’);
(2) a partial system forming a unit of usage or of meaning; (3) incompatibility
of items; (4) matching of items; (5) the play on whether an item is worn
externally or internally; (6) dressing that is reconstituted artificially to create
meanings or for the use of a group (outfits for the theatre or cinema).
22 on this, see a. J. Greimas, ‘L’actualité du saussurisme’, in Le Français
Moderne, July 1956, p. 202 [republished in Greimas 2000, 371–82].
23 The ‘model’ or ‘cover girl’ represents the tightest unity of a dressing
object with a dress object: in any collection of clothes there are traces
of dressing (dimensions of the wearer); however, these traces are tiny
because the real aim of the dressing here is to display an outfit.
24 Sir George h. Darwin, ‘Development in Dress’, Macmillan’s Magazine,
September, 1872 [pp. 410–416; recently republished in Stern 2004,
96-104]. [Editors’ note: analysing men’s clothing only, George h. Darwin
sees a ‘strong analogy’ between development of dress and that of
organisms, and he uses evolutionary theory—natural selection ‘and
associated doctrines of development’—to show that dress also has
‘almost infinite ramifications’ in other areas of study (416); he considers
utility as a determining factor in clothing forms, and fashion (or ‘the
love of novelty’) as having ‘no distant analogy to “sexual selection” ’ in
the ‘Descent of man’, in which both animals and dress forms maintain
‘remnants of former stages of development’, preserving ‘a tattered record
of the history of their evolution’ (410); he then traces these analogies
through styles in hat, coat and boot; nothing, concludes Darwin junior, is
devoid of a cause, ‘the observation of even common things of everyday
life may be made less trivial than at first sight it might appear’ (416).]
25 This is what andré Georges haudricourt and alphonse Juillard have tried
to do in phonology (Essai pour une histoire structurale du phonétisme
français, Paris, Klincksieck, 1949).
26 Les Fonctions psychologiques et les oeuvres, Paris J. vrin, 1948, ch. II.
[Editors’ note: the chapter ‘Le Signe’, pp. 75–115, is an early and useful
explanation and application of Saussurian linguistics to literature.]
27 The bibliography of these enquiries and questionnaires on the psychology
of motivations in clothes (already old, admittedly) can be found in Estelle