fashion theory between sociosemiotics and cultural studies

7/29/2019 Fashion Theory Between Sociosemiotics and Cultural Studies

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Fashion Theory between Sociosemiotics

and Cultural Studies

Patrizia Calefato


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The term fashion theory refers to aninterdisciplinary field that sees fashion asa meaning system within which culturaland aesthetic portrayals of the clothed

body are produced.


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The use of the term fashion theory points to

a transverse theoretical approach which,in advance of any professional know-how,constructs favourable conditions and

theoretical filters by selecting from amongthe human and social sciences (includingliterature, philosophy and art) the fashion

system understood as a special dimensionof material culture, the history of the body,the theory of sensibility.


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Fashion Theoryis also the title of aninternational quarterly edited by Valerie Steeleand published by Berg (Oxford) since 1997
http://www.meltemieditore.it/nuovo/autori/foto.asp?codice=911http://www.fashiontheory.com/subscribe.htmlhttp://www.fashiontheory.com/archives.phphttp://www.fashiontheory.com/NFC.htmlhttp://www.fashiontheory.com/AboutFT.htmlhttp://www.fashiontheory.com/AboutEditor.htmlhttp://www.bergpublishers.com/


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Antecedents and fundamentals

Georg Simmel

Thorstein Veblen Werner Sombart

Walter Benjamin

Linguistic structuralism


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Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

Georg Simmels 1895 essay on fashiondefines it as a system of social cohesionthat allows the individuals membershipof a group to be dialectically reconciledwith his relative spiritual independence.Fashion, says Simmel, is governed by

motives of imitation and distinction,which are transmitted verticallyto thecommunity by a particular social circle.They are accompanied by thestimulating, piquant charm that fashion

conveys through what Simmel describesas the contrast between its broad, all-pervading dissemination and its rapid,fundamental evanescence and as theright to be unfaithful to it


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Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)

Thorstein Veblens TheTheory of the Leisure Class(1899) includes spending onclothing as part ofconspicuous consumption by

the upper middle classes


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Werner Sombart (1863-1941)

Sombart (1913) takes the view

that spending (especially bywomen) on luxuries, of which

clothing and cocotteriesare asignificant part, has been a keyfeature of capitalism ever since

its original accumulation phase.


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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Fashion is the sex appeal of theinorganic.

Fashion represents the triumph of thecommodity form, in which the bodyhas become a cadaver, a fetish. Infashion, in an exemplary manner, therelationships between the living andthe inorganic are Marxisticallyinverted and duplicated: the (female)body displays the charm of a

devitalised, estranged nature, andremains as an envelope, anadornment, a cadaveric support forclothing.


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Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913)

Course of generallinguistics

fashion, unlike language, is not a

completely arbitrary system, since theobsession with clothing that fashion impliescan only move so far beyond the conditionsdictated by the human body.

The mechanism of imitation concerns both

the phenomenon of fashion and thephonetic changes in language, but itsorigin, says the Course, remains a mysteryin both cases.


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Nikolaj Trubeckoj (1890-1938)

There is a homologous relationship

between the system of language and

the system of clothing, betweenphonology and study of costumes,


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Ptr Bogatyrv (1893-1971)

Analysis of the folk costume of MoravianSlovakia, using a functionalist approachthat identified a hierarchy of functions in

the costume, including practical, aesthetic,magical and ritual functions :

practical

aestetical magical

ritual


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Edward Sapir

(1884-1939)

He wrote the fashion entry inthe Encyclopaedia of the SocialSciences, in which heestablished the differencesbetween fashion and taste andbetween fashion and costume,in that the latter is a relatively

stable type of social behaviour,whereas the former is subject toconstant change.


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Clothing, fashion, identity


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Barthes lesson, which thus goes beyond actual

semiology, is that fashion only exists through the

apparatus, technologies and communicationsystems that construct its meaning.

The post-modern context makes clear that awhole series of social discourses from film to

music, the new media and advertising, are theplaces where fashion exists as a syncretic,intertextual system, as a reticular referencebetween the signs of the clothed body and as a

constant construction and deconstruction of thesubjects that negotiate, interpret or receive itsmeaning.


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Dick Hebdige: Subculture(1979)

styleas a form of aesthetic and ethicalgroup membership in mass society withemerging in crowd cultures made up ofblocks that include ways of dressing,music, literature, film and daily habits apop universe that is expressed in streetstyles ranging from rockers to punks,which Hebdige contrasts with fashion seenas one of the pre-eminent forms ofdiscourse.


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23M. Mc Laren & V. Westwood, end 70s


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From trickle-downto bubble-up,

Trickle-down is turned into bubble-up, asis clearly shown by the history of twogarments that are emblematic of the

twentieth century: jeans and the mini-skirt.


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Fashion as mass fashion

The place where a complexity of tensions,

meanings and values and not only inrelation to clothing is manifested.

This complexity is centred on the body andthe ways in which it exists in the world, isrepresented, is masked, disguised and

measured, and clashes with stereotypesand mythologies.


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The clothed body

is the physico-cultural territory in which the

visible, perceivable performance of ouroutward identity takes place. This

composite cultural text-fabric providesopportunities for the manifestation ofindividual and social traits that draw on

such elements as gender, taste, ethnicity,sexuality, sense of belonging to a socialgroup or, conversely, transgression.


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Gender identity and clothing

gender identity through fashion playswiththe canonic, stereotyped ways ofportraying male and female on the onehand, and the challenges to the dominantdiscourse that are conveyed by the signs

of the body on the other.


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Young

Dinkas,

Sudan


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Etudes dtoffes, G.

de Clrambault,

1918-34, Marocco


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Etudes

dtoffes, G. de

Clrambault,1918-34,

Marocco


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Coco

Chanel,

1929


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Burberry, coll.

2000-2001


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Young

Japanese

man


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Windowlicker,

1999


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Pubblicit Ferr jeans


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Dal film The Full

Monty, P. Cattaneo, 1997


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Dal film Priscilla la regina

del deserto, S. Elliot, 1994

F id lk ( t t) t


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From sidewalk (or street) to

catwalk

the places of everyday culture are thosethat determine fashions even before styleresearch has produced the actual artefactas a luxury commodity sign.


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Narrativity

Every fashion effectively contains within ita narrative, or story, that explains its usesand determines its rhythms


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Spatiality

The street, the catwalk, the whole world

become spaces, territories in whichobjects come to life and bodies interact.


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Myth

Fashions take constructions of meaning

and figures of imagination which arereproduced in the social sphere and make

them emblematically natural and eternal,even if transient.


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Sensoriness

Human senses, in their complexity andreciprocity, are at work in the reproductionand communication of fashions

There are stereotypes of feeling, but thereare also forms of excessive sensorinesswhich can use the intrinsic fetishism offashion, the living power of objects andgarments, to invert and humanise theirmeaning.

fashion theory between sociosemiotics and cultural studies

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