Fashion

We know that for Saussure human language can be studied from two directions, that of langue and that of parole. Langue is the social institution, independent of the individual; it is a normative reserve from which the individual draws their parole, ‘a virtual system that is actualized only in and through parole’. Parole is the individual act, ‘an actualized manifestation of the function of langage’, langage being a generic term for both langue and parole. 18 It seems to be extremely useful, by way of an analogy to clothing, to identify an institutional, fundamentally social, reality, which, independent of the individual, is like the systematic, normative reserve from which the individual draws their own clothing, and which, in correspondence to Saussure’s langue, we propose to call dress. and then to distinguish this from a second, individual reality, the very act of ‘getting dressed’, in which the individual actualizes on their body the general inscription of dress, and which, corresponding to Saussure’s parole, we will call dressing. Dress and dressing form then a generic whole, for which we propose to retain the word clothing (this is langage for Saussure). History and Sociology of Clothing

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We must obviously be careful about extending this analogy without due care and attention. only the functional opposition of the two levels can have any methodological value. This was spotted in relation to dress itself by Trubetskoy, who established a parallel between the tasks of phonetics and those of vestimentary description. 19 The opposition dress/ dressing furthermore can only help to reinforce a sociological standpoint: by strongly characterizing dress as an institution and separating this institution from the concrete and individual acts by which it (so to speak) realizes itself, we can research and isolate the social components of dress: age groups, genders, classes, degrees of civilization, localization. Dressing then remains an empirical fact, capable of being analysed with a phenomenological approach: the degree of scruffiness or dirtiness of a worn garment, for example, is part of dressing, it has no sociological value, except if scruffiness and dirtiness function as intentional signs (in a theatre costume for example). Conversely, a less obvious element of appearance, such as the differential mark in a garment for married and unmarried women in any society, will be part of dress and has a strong social value.

Dressing means the personal mode with which the wearer adopts (albeit badly) the dress that is proposed to them by their social group. It can have a morphological, psychological or circumstantial meaning, but it is not sociological.20

Dress is the proper object of sociological and historical research, and we have already underlined the importance of the notion of vestimentary system.21

Dress and dressing can appear to coincide sometimes, but it is not difficult to re-establish the distinction in each case: the broadness of the shoulders, for example. This is part of dressing when it corresponds exactly to the anatomy of the wearer; but part of dress when its dimension is prescribed by the group as part of a fashion. It is very obvious that there is a constant movement between dressing and dress, a dialectical exchange that is defined in relation to langue and parole as a veritable praxis.22

For the sociologist it is obviously the move from dressing to dress which is the most important. This passage can be seen in the broadening of a dressing object (with the express condition that this broadening can be defined as a phenomenon of adoption), or even in a technological initiative taken by a clothes manufacturer or syndicated 10

The Language of Fashion

producer. For example, the wearing of a coat over the shoulders, arms dangling, becomes part of dress as soon as: (1) a community makes it into a distinctive mark imposed on its members (for example, Brothers of the Ecoles chrétiennes); (2) the manufacturer provides the coats with internal straps for the arms with which to support the coat without rolling the sleeves up (English system). It must be noted that a dressing object that is at first constituted by the degrading of a dress object can subsequently transform itself once more into a secondary dress object: this occurs as soon as this degrading actually functions as a collective sign, as a value. For example, the outfit can gesture towards the using of all of the buttons on the shirt; and then a dressing object of some sort leaves the top two buttons undone: this omission becomes dress again as soon as it is constituted as a norm by a particular group (such as in dandyism).

Fashion is always part of dress; but its origins can represent either of our two categories. Fashion can be part of a dress object that has been artificially elaborated by specialists at any one moment (for example, haute couture); at another moment, it can be constructed by the propagation of a simple act of dressing that is then reproduced at the collective level and for a number of reasons. 23 This ordering of objects needs to be studied carefully. But what we can perhaps now foresee is that the link between dressing and dress is a semantic one: the meaning of a garment increases as we move from dressing to dress. Dressing is a weak form of meaning, it expresses more than it notifies; dress on the contrary is a strong form of meaning, it constitutes an intellectual, notifying relation between a wearer and their group.

Diachrony and synchrony

We have already pointed out that it was necessary to distinguish in clothes between the synchronic or systematic level and the diachronic or processive level. once again as with language, the major problem here is that of putting together, in a truly dialectical snapshot, the link between system and process. George h. Darwin, nephew of Charles Darwin, got an inkling of this problem when he established a parallel between biological and vestimentary development, with the garment History and Sociology of Clothing

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corresponding to an organism and the system (a whole type of garments) to a species. 24 In fact, the problem cannot be resolved so long as the system has not been defined according to internal criteria, something that histories of dress have not yet done. Linguistics, for its part, is in the process of working to clarify the links between synchrony and diachrony, without yet succeeding; in other words, the science of dress, which has as yet to be constituted, has so far not carefully examined the data. But by looking to the example of linguistics we are able to suggest two methodological caveats—historical and sociological—to guide us towards a definitive explanation. We must first agree to make the notion of system more flexible, that is to think of structures in terms of tendencies rather than perhaps in terms of a rigid equilibrium. Clothes live in tight symbiosis with their historical context, much more so than language; violent historical episodes (wars, exoduses, revolutions) can rapidly smash a system; but also, in contrast to language, the recasting of the system is much quicker. however, it would not be desirable, at this point, to reintroduce, into the flux of vestimentary forms, any external determinisms before having identified all of the internal factors that, within the system itself, play at least a part in its evolution.25

Signifier and signified

as we know, Saussure posited a science of meanings under the name of semiology, of which linguistic semantics would be but a part. It goes without saying that dress—which cannot be reduced to its protective or ornamental function—is a privileged semiological field: one could say that it is the signifying function of dress which makes it a total social object. Drawing on the observations on the sign made by Ignace meyerson, 26 let us distinguish, for dress, between indexical objects and signifying or notifying ones:

Indices The index operates outside of any intention of directed behaviour. The link that many histories have established between dress and the ‘spirit’ of an age would be part of the indexical, if such a link could be proven to have any scientific power which is, as yet, far from being the case. We find more reliable indexical objects in studies by a 12

The Language of Fashion

certain number of anglo-Saxon writers, where dress is treated as the index of a certain interiority. This research has taken two directions. Firstly, it has been properly psychological (in the united States), in the sense of a psychology of choices and motivations, in which attempts have been made to identify the hierarchy of motives in vestimentary choices, with the aid of questionnaires and even tests. 27 But here we are really talking about a limited number of indices which the psychology in question has never tried to link to a psychic, or social, totality. The second direction in this research on the psychology of dress takes its inspiration from psychoanalysis, in the widest sense of the term. It is easy for everyone to see what a psychoanalytical reading could find in a cultural object whose erotic implications are fairly obvious and whose formal characteristics lend themselves easily to symbolic interpretations; these attempts at explaining cannot be assessed without making an overall judgement on psychoanalysis itself, which is not our job here. however, whilst remaining outside of a psychoanalytical postulate, it seems that analyses of this type are more fruitful when it comes to describing what we might call expressions of personality (self-expression, self-bodility, in the classifications made by Flügel 28 ), than when analysing symbolization proper, where we have, it seems, to be wary of ‘shortcuts’. 29 From a methodological point of view what is interesting in a psychoanalytical explanation, is that the notion of index is itself ambiguous: is vestimentary form really an index, produced outside of any intention? Within the psychoanalytical perspective there is always an (unconscious) choice of an outfit by the collective, or of a way of dressing on the part of the wearer; and here dress is always set up as an object for possible deciphering by the person reading it (group, super-Ego or analyst). Dress, for the psychoanalyst, is meaning more than index: the notion of censorship lays the basis for the notion of control in social psychology, just as the notion of sublimation is nothing other than the psychoanalytical version of the process of rationalization. It would appear then that the equivalences identified by psychoanalysis are more factors of expression than indices.

Meanings or Notifications Between the indexical and the notifying, there may well be mobile and ill-defined boundaries: such and such an object of notification can come from a previous indexical object—the