38 The Language of Fashion
the cool climate of normandy) with another (warm and light materials,
enveloping and elegant forms), using the most elementary of signifying
processes. I am not yet certain that clothing does carry meaning; but
I am right at least to apply a linguistic method of analysis to it: it is this
conformity of the method to its object that will prove to me the signifying
nature of fashion clothing,^2 rather than the consciousness of its wearers,
which is to some extent an alienated one.
- For fashion-magazine rhetoric is actively engaged in hiding the
semantic nature of the links that it proposes. Sometimes the rhetoric
presents the signifieds (fashionability, slinkiness, springtime) as qualities
inherent to the forms it proposes, suggesting that there is a kind of
physical causality between fashion and the colour blue, between the
accessory and spring.^3 Elsewhere, the rhetoric reduces the signified to
a simple utilitarian function (a coat for the journey). Whether causality
or finality, the phrasing used in a fashion magazine always has a subtle
tendency to transform the linguistic status of the clothing item into one
of naturalness or usefulness, to invest an effect or a function in the sign;
in both cases, it is all about changing an arbitrary link into a natural
property or a technical affinity, in short providing fashion creations with
the guarantee of being eternal or empirically necessary. The fashion
magazine, it has to be said, never uses anything but sign-functions:
the function can never be separated from its sign. a raincoat protects
against rain, but also and indissociably, it points to its status as raincoat.
This is moreover the fundamental status of clothes: an item of clothing
that is purely functional is conceivable only outside of any notion of
society—as soon as an item is actually manufactured, it inevitably
becomes an element in semiology. - The first task, then, is to reduce the phraseology of the fashion
magazine (which does not mean that we will not later have to reinterpret it,
and at that point in a mythological way). What becomes apparent then are
the simple links, belonging to a single model (which allows us to collate),
between signifieds and signifiers. These links are simple, but they are not
pure; for the signifiers are always part of a physical world which is the
clothing content, the fragment of bodily space occupied by the clothing
item (a woman’s suit, a pleat, a clip brooch, gilt buttons, etc.); whereas
the signifieds (romantic, nonchalant, cocktail party, countryside, skiing,
feminine youth, etc.) are given to me necessarily via the written word, via
a literature (that it is poor literature in no way changes its status).^4