[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 73privileged object of semiological analysis as it does for three reasons.
First, because those extra-semantic ends, which were, as we saw,
such a nuisance to real clothing, are absent here: fashion clothing
neither serves to protect nor to adorn but at best to signify protection
by adornment: its being is entirely absorbed in its meaning. Second,
since it is not being worn but only being proposed, Fashion clothing
is a pure institution, devoid of all practical use; it is a langue without
parole^17 and moreover this langue is artificial, elaborated not by the
sum of users who are more or less conscious of their actions but by a
group of decision-makers (the fashion group): Fashion clothing is, if you
like, a logo-technics. Finally, Fashion clothing offers to the semiologist
something human languages have always refused to the linguist: a
pure synchrony; Fashion’s synchrony changes suddenly every year but
during that year it is absolutely stable: it is possible therefore to work on
the fashionable without having to divide it up artificially as the linguist is
obliged to do with the muddle of messages in a diachrony.^18
Since it was a question of establishing the semantic system of
fashion clothing in its institutional purity—and not its usage—the corpus
was to be formed from that material which showed the clothing style
with its origins, that is at the moment when it was artificially constituted
in language and before being disseminated via real clothing; and it
is this material that is found obviously in the fashion magazine. one
might conceivably suggest that the small-scale models used by the big
fashion designers, such as those sent to the studio or presentational
models, constitute a purer corpus since they are closer to the logo-
technical act; but precisely, this act is never fully finished until it reaches
the fashion magazine stage, because it is the language of the magazine
which gives the clothing created by haute couture the structure of a
signifier and the power to signify; before being taken up by the fashion
magazine, haute couture clothing (whether a small-scale model or a
clothing range) is much closer to a working model than to a semantic
unit (it is the prototype of a magical display, determining an act of
fabrication, and its value is technological). Clothing that is meaningful in
its entirety is to be found in the Fashion magazine (all the more so since
the ‘readership’ here is massive), and therefore it is Fashion magazines
which must constitute the corpus for our analysis.
Is this all Fashion magazines? Certainly not. Two types of limit
on choices could be applied here, both authorised, and even