‘Blue is in Fashion This Year’ 51Notes
1 Published in Revue Française de Sociologie, vol. 1 no. 2 (april) 1960,
147–62; Oeuvres complètes vol. 1, 856–68.
2 I do not mean here an article of clothing as it is worn (even if it is in
fashion), but only women’s clothing as it is presented in words or in
pictures in fashion publications. Such an article of clothing could be
defined as a ‘utopia’.
3 Because is one of fashion literature’s favourite conjunctions. There is a
curious symmetry between a fashion magazine that tends to convert an
equation into a causality, and the way that logic moves in the opposite
direction with its refusal to see any truth factors in connectors such
as because and in order to, and its tendency to remove them from
logical calculation precisely because, and this is the case of the fashion
magazine, these connectors are too empirical. From a purely semiological
point of view, the vanity involved in any causal (or final) link between a
signifier and a signified is evident in the following (invented) example: think
of an advertisement for a make of pipe, with a caption of this sort: ‘I am
calm, I am strong, I smoke a pipe’. The two inverse causalities have the
same impact: I am calm because I smoke a pipe; I smoke a pipe because
I am calm. all we have here is a semantic link.
4 It is true that the signifier is very often communicated via verbal description;
but this then is only a substitute for the image (witness the importance of
photographs and drawings which the words merely reinforce); whereas the
signified never exists except in articulated language.
5 Mythologies, Paris, Seuil, 1957 [1970].
6 It is obviously not in traditional grammars that you will find demonstratives
of this kind listed. you will find a better commentary in the work by
Jacques Damourette and Edouard Pichon (Essai de grammaire de
la langue française, 1911–27, Paris, Editions d’artrey), in the chapter
devoted to what the authors call the ‘presentational space of the noun’
(vol. 1, book 4, ch. vI, 466–518).
7 It is not the same thing to describe a structure according to its signifiers
and according to its signifieds. Do the signifiers flow, in some sense
genetically, from the signifieds, or conversely is there some endogenous
organization of the signifiers? Benoît mandelbrot has asked this question
remarkably in L. apostel, B. mandelbrot and a. morf, Logique, langage et
théorie de l’information, Paris, PuF, 1957, p. 63 [and passim; mandelbrot
reiterates Saussure’s point that, if the former pertains then semiology will
be tied to other forms of enquiry; if the latter pertains, then semiology, as
the study of signifiers on their own, will be independent of other sciences,
which, argues mandelbrot, is what Saussure wanted].