Language and Clothing 27what is called the article (a shirt, a skirt, a jacket), is not necessarily
a signifying unit. Clearly meaning is not located in the finished object,
it can be found in a tiny detail or in a complex outfit. Except in cases
of flagrant eccentricity, the item signifies nothing. Furthermore, it has
been a long time since our clothing represented any analogical link
between signifier and signified except when we have recourse to a
universal symbolism of the unconscious sort; one of the last analogies
in our Western dress was in the middle ages when there was the
particoloured outfit worn by madmen, a symbol of psychic division;
since then, forms seem to have followed an evolution which is properly
internal, removed from all symbolic reference (and this constitutes
another of the lessons of the work of richardson and Kroeber). on
the one hand we have the signifieds (for example: youthfulness,
intellectualism, respectability, bohemianism, etc.) and on the other
signifiers which are abstract, highly mobile, arbitrary forms, (and
which we could even say are ‘an-iconic’), but without the link between
the signifiers and the signifieds, that is the meaning, ever losing its
normative, threatening, terroristic character.
This probably means that the semiology of clothing is not lexical but
syntactic. It is because meaning is neither motivated, nor coded, by
an ancestral grammar in the way that clothing was in ancient oriental
societies, that we are forced to look for clothing’s unit of meaning not
in whole, isolated items, but in true functions, oppositions, distinctions
and congruences. These are probably quite closely analogous to
the units of phonology. So, as in phonology, we should submit the
vestimentary continuum to a series of commutation tests, in order to
isolate the units that really do hold meaning (the semes); to take a
rather crude example, does putting leather buttons on a jacket give it a
new meaning? It is likely that simple oppositions (leather buttons/other
buttons) are only remotely meaningful; it is the ‘combinatory variants’,
true functions of functions, which are able to achieve the status of
being meaningful (for example: tweed/leather buttons/lighter-pocket,
etc.). of course, the absence of elements can play a role which is
meaningful (for example, not wearing a tie): the vestimentary sign can
be expressed as the degree zero, it is never null. Conversely, we should
learn to decipher the accumulation of signifiers: in the majority of outfits
there is a redundancy of messages, the study of which could lead to a
structural definition of taste.