If you want to have a language, you need to have signs, or symbols if you wish. That is things that stand for other things. Like a word stands for a thing, for an idea, and so on. But, of course, that's not enough because you have a lot of signs which are not linguistic at all. For example, smoke may be taken the sign of there is fire. Of course, smoke is not a language per se. Another thing you might want to have is this idea of communication. It's not just that the sign indicate something. It's that to the sign is used indicate that thing. Again, that's not enough at all.Because for example, I can paint my face with blood to express anger. That's a sign, that I use to communicate something, but of course, that's not a language at all. So, obviously you need more than that to pinpoint what is specific to languages in general. That will have to do is some sort of systematicity, a famous idea by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure, that a language is a system of relations and oppositions. If you take the word "mutton" and "sheep" in English, then there are two different ways to name the same animal, but "sheep" is the animal as a living species, and "mutton" is the animal as meat.
The meaning of "mutton" is partly characterized by the fact that it is to be distinguished from the meaning of "sheep" for example. But the distinctive of a language, it's not just that you use signs, but that you use them in a certain way, and that you have the ability to combine them. Signs may be combined in a productive manner. That idea was expressed, for example, in a famous phrase by the German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the 19th century, who said that languages were the infinite use of finite means. What did Humboldt mean by that? He meant that, when you speak a language, you have the ability to produce an infinite amount of sentences. you can say that "you know that today is going to be a hard day for France", for example. But you can also say that "I know that you know that today is going to a hard day for France". or that "you know that I know that you know that today is going to be a hard day for France", and so on. Essentially, you have the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences, which means that when we learn a language, we don't just learn to match a given situation with a given sentence, but we learn something much more general, which is an ability to produce sentences in potentially infinite number of sentences.
And of course, we're all just finite being, so what must we learn when I a language is something like a set of rules. What kind of rules are we talking about? The rule of syntax first, when we speak a language, we're able to produce sentences which are correct, we have the ability to distinguish between something such as "colorless, green, furiously sleeping, couch", which is a sequence of words which doesn't count as a sentence, and something like "I am furiously sleeping on the couch", which may be hard to interpret, but which is a sentence of English. But then, of course, the main point is to get to meanings. Again, we have a same issue with infinity, that is since there's an infinite number of sentences in a language, you can not know in advance, or learn by heart, what the meanings of all the sentences of a language might be. It means that somehow you must to be able to know rules that account for the meanings of more complex units, the basis of more simple units. That's what people doing linguistic call the principle of compositionality. The idea that when you know a language, you know how to combine meanings to get to the meaning of more complex expressions. And, you have also a principle of pragmatics, that would be the last set of rules to consider. The same sentences can mean very different things in very different contexts. For example, if Benjamin applies to a position in a U.S university and he asks someone to write a letter for him. Then, they're writing something like "Benjamin is very polite, he's always on time. There is really no problem with him. Best regards..." Then, of course, there is something that they didn't say. they didn't say anything about Benjamin's intellectual abilities. The person reading this letter would say "Oh! But, he's trying to recommend Benjamin, he's saying nothing about how smart he is. Maybe he doesn't think that Benjamin is smart". There would be a pragmatic influence that if, in a context in which I'm supposed to say something about how smart the person is, and I don't say anything about that, then it means that I'm trying to hide something, or there is some info that I don't want to give. And then, even though, in my letter, I say only good things, that you're polite, etc. it will count as a very bad letter.
Is it the case that what you are wearing indicates something, or may stand for something? If your wearing a diving suit, it would indicate that your about to go in the water. That's quite trivial and that has nothing to do with being a language, precisely because there's no, in that case, intent for communication. you're just wearing this diving suit because I plan to dive, and do not use this as a way to communicate, or to express something. Then, is it the case that when you wear a certain piece of clothes at least, is it the case that you you mean to communicate something? For example, if you look at uniforms, they say that other people who wear them have certain roles or certain functions within society. So, what about this idea of systems? This idea that you would select units among an array of choices? And that the meaning of a given unit depends on how it relates to other units? In the language case, for example, you would say that, when you want to address someone in American English, you may address the person as "mister" or "miss" or "mrs." or "ms". These are the four options and of course, the fact that you use one of these options, part of what it means, is the fact that you decided not to select another option. If you address someone as "ms", it means that you decide not to classify her as unmarried or as married. You choose "ms" precisely because you do not want to choose "Miss" or "mrs". The idea that you select units which get some meaning because of the way the relate and oppose to other units seems quite intuitive in the case of clothing, because precisely, you're going to choose a piece of clothes among a range of possibilities, and the fact that you're going to use this, rather than that one, is precisely meaningful. For example, if you choose jeans, there are some sense in which you could say it's somewhere in between choosing something much more informal like sweatpants, and choosing something like linen trousers, or something like that. It means that the choice of wearing jeans makes sense as a way to exclude something more informal, like sweatpants, and as a way not to go for something more formal like other kinds of trousers, or something like that. you would say that this third feature, the "systematicity" in the structuralist sense, makes a lot of sense, in the case of clothing as well. the very crucial feature is, of course, the fourth one, namely this idea that you can produce an infinite amount of symbols, contents, and meanings. Would it make any sense to speak, I mean to consider rules of syntax, or semantics, or pragmatics, for clothing? Syntax is just the idea that various items have to be arranged in various ways, depending on the kind of items they are. When you dress, you need to combine items in a way which depends on the kind of items that they are. Because, you need underwear, you need something for the bottom of your body, you need something for the upper parts of your body. But then, the very crucial bit comes with "semantics".
Of course, when you look at an outfit, it's obviously a combination of various pieces of clothing, and, in an informal way, the meaning of that outfit clearly depends on which piece of clothing constitutes it, and how they are combined. You could also say the same thing for an item itself. You could say that, in other way, what a jacket means depends on the various parts that would constitute a jacket. The question is, it's really the case that you can find the same kind of dependence, between the meaning of a whole, and the meaning of the parts - in the case of outfits, that you find in the case of phrases and words. In the case of phrases, you cannot know all the meanings in advance. So, what you need to be able to literally infer the meanings from whole from the meanings of the parts, because you have this infinite number of phrases that you can produce. In the case of clothing, the meaning of a jacket, for example, will depend on its parts. But this dependence seems to be much more slack, hard to grasp, much more open to interpretation, than in the case for phrases, in regular languages.
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Let's look at an example of a piece of clothes which is a clear combination of two things. Take, for example, what's called in English "souvenir jackets". Souvenir jacket is typically a combination of two things, namely a baseball jacket, and traditional Japanese embroideries. Now, you may look at what's the meaning of a souvenir jacket, on the basis of what you remember from movies for example. So, you've seen "Drive" and Ryan Gosling wearing such a jacket. Or you've seen "Pigs and Battleships" by Imamura where you have this young Yakuza who is also having this quite marvelous looking jacket. In both cases, they stand for something like maybe "glamorous rebellion". The problem is that there's no clear way in which we'd get "glamorous rebellion" from a baseball jacket and Japanese embroideries. What it means to wear such a jacket clearly has to do with it being a mix of Japanese and American outfits. There is still, not the same idea that you're able to strictly derive the meaning of a whole from the meaning of a parts. That the degree to which compositionality contributes to meaning in the cases of outfits, or pieces of clothes, is much lower than in the case of phrases and sentences. There are pragmatics, also in the case of clothing. Wearing a policeman uniform, as a policeman, or at the Gay Pride for example, would give very different meanings to the outfit. Which are true, according to your beliefs, and which are going to be understandable by the hearer. At the core of fashion, there is both the idea that you try to replicate some codes, but that you also try to distinguish yourself from other codes.
This idea of distinction is, of course, completely opposite to the idea of a transparent communication, of using, again and again, the same conventions, so that things are as smooth, or as easy as possible. If you want to be part of a new trend, quite likely that you will not be well understood by lots of people who are not aware of that trend. But the fact that you are not understood will, of course, maybe part of your pleasure to be in the trend. an example where the pragmatics of clothing, in the case of what it is to follow a trend, seems to be extremely different from the pragmatics of general communication, because there is a strive for distinction and non-transparency, which is at play in the constitution of meanings in the case of outfits.
Is fashion a language ?
Canadian anthropologist, particularly famous for his books Culture and Consumption published in 1988, and Culture and Consumption IIin 2005, Grant McCracken expands at length on the relationship between language and clothing in “Clothing as Language. An Object Lesson in the Study of the Expressive Properties of Material Culture”, from Culture and Consumption. Starting with a commentary of an article in which New Zealand anthropologist Roger Neich studied Papuan costumes using structural linguistics, McCracken then defended the thesis that clothing could not be considered a language.
The mathematical model of communication
First of all, let us briefly focus on the structural linguistic model on which McCracken is based. This one, first taken from the “mathematical model of communication”, proposed in 1948 by Claude Shannon, is based on the following diagram:
According to this linear scheme, also called “E-C-R” and influenced by the telegraph metaphor, a transmitter would therefore send a “coded” message to a receiver, which would then receive and decode the message.
Jakobson will add two principles corresponding to the encoding and decoding phases, namely a “paradigmatic” principle, i. e. a choice within a “vertical” repertoire of terms (the dog or the cat), and a “syntagmatic” or horizontal principle referring to the way these terms will be arranged in the sentence (the man has a cat). For McCracken, these are the two principles that allow language to be “a collective and systematic means of communication” and “an instrument of endlessly various expressive potential”.
Fashion and linguistic code
From these two models, McCracken wonders to what extent clothing is comparable to language, and more precisely to the linguistic code. To do this, he decides to conduct an experiment with a panel of participants, consisting of measuring how they perceive “communication” in the face of slides featuring clothing. He observes three types of responses, including a certain, uncertain, or totally impossible interpretation.
- The first type of reaction refers to a certain and instantaneous interpretation of the clothing message, ultimately corresponding to certain social types. Here, the outfits are identified as “businessman”, “housewife”, or “hippie” outfits. While the transparency of the message has the merit of being clear, it is not enough for McCracken to describe the clothing message as “language”. Interpretation, sinning by its lack of linearity, of reading meaning, does not follow a syntagmatic logic, to simply consider the message as a “whole” comparable to a social type.
- McCracken also perceives another category of interpretations that we will call “uncertain”. In the presence of clothes with more incoherent appearances, participants no longer seem to justify a perfect reading of the message. They then seek to dissociate “body sentences”, but in a way that is quite different from their behavior with language.
- Faced with even less readable clothing, the author finally observes certain participants in a situation where it is impossible to read, as the clothing is definitely too far from pre-established dress standards.
This last category allows McCracken to come to the hypothesis that the more the clothing message imitates language and its combinatorial freedom, the less it will be understood. This is proof for him that clothing cannot constitute a language, but at most a “code” restricted by the absence of a combinatorial principle, in other words by the necessary prefabrication of a message similar to identified social types.
McCracken’s theory is particularly noticeable in new clothing. This is how some fashion outfits cannot be understood by the layman’s eye. Let’s imagine, for example, the opinion of a layman on the creation of Vetements. How could he then grasp the fact that the signifier of the garment worn may not at all refer to its usual signified content. This is the misadventure experienced by a buyer of the printed trench coat “Polizei” from the Spring-Summer 2016 Vetements collection, then arrested in Stuttgart by the German police for having put on a suit that could be similar to the police uniform.
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