50 The Language of Fashion
it is cited, to the signified fashion. Therefore I can—and I must—treat all
that is said by the fashion magazine as a virtual feature of meaning, and
make these notations into signifying material and incorporate them into
my formal types: moreover they sit here very well, and the list of pure
fashion signifiers will coincide pretty closely with the list of more specific
signifiers. In this way we are sure of a very wide yet homogenous
inventory.
- Can this inventory (of signifying forms) be exhaustive? It is
necessary first to remember that, since the object of this research is
purely synchronic, we must have collected only those features and
forms found during one year.^24 Furthermore, what is listed are models,
not averages; as soon as a feature is recorded, it is no longer necessary
to count the number of times it appears: a regular feature is no more
meaningful than a rare one; it is not the size of a particular fashion form
that allows it to carry meaning, but its relation to other forms.
It follows then, that after a while the inventory of signifying forms
will be saturated; in practical terms it never is completely; but if the
general structure is established correctly, a form, whatever it is, is never
unforeseeable. It is certainly still possible to find a new sign; but if the
formal types are well established, it will be incorporated into one or
several of these without any friction. - For the ‘renewal’ of fashion is linked essentially to the apparent
novelty of combinations, and not to the novelty of features. ‘vestemes’
are finite (and probably small) in number^25 , and so the total number
of their combinations is also; and this total number is even smaller,
because certain combinations are impossible by virtue of certain
rules of incompatibility. Indeed, the abundance of forms, upon which
the whole mythology of fashion is constructed (‘caprice’, ‘taste’,
‘invention’, ‘intuition’, ‘inexhaustible renewal’, etc.), is an illusion, which
is possible only because, with the synchrony here being very short, the
play of combinations easily goes beyond, if only by a little, any human
memory of these forms. But all that would be needed would be to
build a mathematical memory (as a machine for making fashion),^26 for
fashion to appear, even at the level of a micro-diachrony, to be a limited
and essentially computable set of forms: this is a shocking truth for a
commerce based entirely on the exaltation of incessant newness, but
useful precisely for an understanding of how an ideology turns the real
inside out.