66 The Language of Fashion
Saussurian-influenced structural linguistics, the semiological project has
very recently enjoyed a much wider currency from the moment when
a whole series of different research activities, which had commenced
independently, all matured at the same time and converged towards a
new epistemological complex, consisting of information theory, formal
logic and linguistics, and concerned with the analysis of systems of
meaning. It is still far too early to write the history of this new current;
many filiations can be found in it that probably go beyond Saussure
himself, not to mention those orthogenetic phenomena which show
that the same idea can appear at the same time in different authors.
however, it is when a methodological intention mushrooms outside its
original idea that its unifying principle is revealed: by treating a set of
ethnological objects persistently in terms of meaning (kinship relations,
myths, totemic representations), Cl. Lévi-Strauss has opened up the
social sciences to the idea of semiology (often confused with the
idea of structural analysis thanks to Saussurian linguistics); and if the
investigations of Jean-Claude Gardin and those of Lacan remain rather
specialized in the former’s drawing up of inventories and in the latter’s
being deliberately ambiguous,^4 they are nonetheless (to limit ourselves
to the French domain) a part of semiology’s currency in the way in
which they link the human psyche and a large part of world memory
to this new science of signs. The present work is undoubtedly aiming
quite deliberately to be part of this movement; but, compared to the
intensity of the work being undertaken in this area at the moment, our
work may appear to be lagging somewhat.^5 First, because our work
had already started about seven years ago (though unfortunately this
delay does not explain the precarious nature of the results presented
here), and because the very principle of this study required a logical
rather than a syncretic impetus and was not primarily concerned with
the development of semiological theory. and most importantly because
we wanted continually to return this study to its primary objective, which
was to apply the semiological analysis postulated by Saussure to a non-
linguistic object, Fashion clothing; this explains why we had to refrain
from taking part in the semiological debate, for example by arguing
for semiology’s pertinence on the one hand, and for that of the social
sciences on the other (not to mention that of marxism, psychoanalysis
and phenomenology), but also why we wanted obstinately and
narrowly to consider methodically, step by step and in a literal fashion,