fashion: Figurative and plastic semiotics

semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretations

"Plastic semiotics is one of the most recent branches of Algirdas Julius Greimas' school of semiotics aiming at the research into the effects of sense produced by the sensorial dimension of expression. ... This semiotics is based on the assumption that the natural world is a kind of language, a certain type of semiotics."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/469358?seq=1

Lithuanian linguist and semiologist, Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917-1992) wrote a thesis on the description of the clothing vocabulary of the fashion newspapers of 1830 (1948), before joining, alongside Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1965 and directing his research towards an attempt to overcome the word and sentence, then towards extending his theory to all sign systems. Written in 1978, the article “Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics of the plastics arts” belongs to this project of theoretical extension. If it does not mention clothing, the “plastic semiotics” is general enough to apply to fashion. 

Deploring the weakness of the many works devoted to “visual semiotics” — also called “semiology of images” — often based on an artificial distinction between the allegedly constructed feature of the image and the “natural” feature of verbal discription or conversation, as well as between the “planar structures” of the visual and the non-planar (3D) structures of conversation, A.J. Greimas proposes to forge a semiotic theory of the visual. 
He considers distinguishing two types of semiotic interpretation, namely “figurative semiotics” and “plastic semiotics”. How do they differ?

The first, based on the idea of correspondence between the visual signifier and the natural signified, on the concepts of imitation and recognition, is defined by a “reading grid” consisting of a “division of visual meaning objects according to a lexicalization”. 

For instance, the elements of Paul Klee’s painting Blumen-mythos can be simply interpreted as “pines” or “hills”. If this reading is justified in some cases, it nevertheless seems to face some difficulties, especially when it faces works like those of Kandinsky seeking precisely to go beyond the notion of figuration.

It is precisely this difficulty that prompts A. J. Greimas to think of an alternative way of reading, which he calls “plastic semiotics”, partly inspired by the art critics developed by Diderot in the 18th century, which already distinguished “nameable” objects (“what the painter wanted to say”) and elements still unsuspected (“what the painter wanted to do”). Defined as “another language”, 

this reading is rather similar to “poetic reading”, going beyond the first function of representing the signifier. To do this, the author counts several steps. Thus we must start by studying the “topological mechanism”, in other words by defining the “framework-format” and “topological categories” of our object,

 before taking an interest in the chromatic categories (colors) and eidetic categories (forms) in order to grasp their recurrences and contrasts at the syntagmatic level, and finally by paying our attention to the “orientation”, in other words in the sense of reading implied by the representation. In this sense, a simple architectural plan designed by Mies van der Rohe could, for example, be praised for its “orthogonality” by A. Vergniaud, or Blumen-mythos would seem to represent a “flower woman”.

Without continuing on the technical considerations of these two modes of reading, let us retain the considerable contribution of plastic semiotics for the analysis of works where the correspondence between the visual signifier and the “natural” signifier is not obvious, as in the case of abstraction in painting. Let us now try to sketch, thanks to J.-M. Floch, what the application of such a theory to clothing would be like.