Title: The Language of Fashion: one of the Linguistic models
Abstract: Fashion is a social system based on convention. So as to study the workings of the system, Roland Barthes chooses to focus on the captions beneath photographs in fashion magazines, because the language of captions isolates the features which make a particular garment fashionable, orients perception and divides continuous phenomena into discrete categories. The widths of lapels on suits form a continuum, but if the caption speaks of the wide lapels on a particular suit it introduces a distinctive feature to characterize those which are a la mode. The description is an instrument of structuration. In other words, language permits one to pass from the material to the units of s system of signification by bringing out, through the process of naming, meaning that was merely latent in the object. Barthes`s linguistic model requires him to collect a corpus of data from a single synchronic state of the system, and fashion, of course, is eminently suitable for such treatment since it changes abruptly once a year when designers bring out their new collections. The choice of a corpus is determined only by the linguists` assertion of the priority of synchronic description and the desire to give an impression of fidelity and rigor. A society devotes considerable time and resources to the elaboration of systems designed to make the world heavy with meaning to convert objects into signs. On one hand it seems that men deploy an equal energy in masking the systematic nature of their creations and reconverting the semantic relation into a natural or rational one. On the other hand, the very energy employed in the proliferation and naturalization of sings undermines the meaning accorded to objects. One has only to think of the way in which the rallying cry of realism has served to justify changes in literary artifice, and of the ways in which the desire to make the real signify has led to the creation of autonomous worlds, to see that such paradoxes are not the property of fashion alone.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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