fashion: ecosystems and nature

Fashion has two different relations with ecosystems.

1) impact of the whole fashion industry on ecosystems.

2) circular economy in fashion.

 A circular economy has some characteristics that connect to ecosystems thinking, to use ecosystem thinking to get perspectives for the fashion industry. circular economy should have the same characteristics as ecosystems, as nature, so the new economy should also be unending, it should have sources and ways of working that look like ecosystems.

 The aim is to change the fashion system. work on a systems change, when you work on systems change, you need to see what kind of interventions you can do to facilitate the change in ecology and nature. Systems are never closed systems, but always open systems. And the connection with the surrounding world is always important , the most challenging is that nobody has any clue of what the ecology is.

 what are the the characteristics of an ecosystem? you can see three levels more or less in development, the first is on the product level: better design better use of materials and cleaner production.

The second is on process level identifying potential new business models that could be adapted in the fashion sector.

the third level is of course the level of systems change, which is the most, vague ambition, and difficult to identify what should be done.

 But we try at least to work on all three levels of innovation.

 What can we learn from ecology for the economy - mimic ecology for economy. diversity is very important in nature development and ecology. You can see that time and activities over time are very important for the quality of ecosystems. When you take a forest there are, let's say products that lasts the trees.

ecosystem has an amount of resources, nutrients, that is flowing around in the system slower or faster, and keeps the ecosystem on a high level of quality and growth.  Maybe the strategy should be: what do we have in abundance? we have in abundance: energy from the sun - Nine thousand times as much as we need for the whole human system, the sun sends us every moment of the day.  But we technically are not yet there to use it in the good way.We have an abundancy of creativity, which is no problem. Use it and let's have it in the fashion sector more and more. And so on design level we can do far more than we do now. Not just in the creativity but also in  design of the materials and the way the materials can be used after use. And how the resources can come back into the flows.

 C&A now has several gold certified t-shirt and jeans and jean jackets. And that's on the highest level possible on a product level, the highest level possible for reuse and regaining the materials. we also need to

 Give workers a voice, give female workers a voice, challenge and change the gender situation in the industry. from an ecological perspective this is using the diversity in the sector to gain quality in the way we collaborate. we need to try and not just create less impact, less negative impact but We also want to create also a positive impact.

for example the zero line, we have a zero negative impact,  is not enough.you need to step over the zero line and have a positive impact. So whatever you do in the fashion industry, it has a positive impact on people, on working condition on living conditions. It has a positive impact on ecology, on biodiversity and ecosystems, and it has a positive impact on economy

ecological systems work with products that last and products that flow. In nature, products that last are things like trees, while products that flow are the leaves that fall from the tree and become nutrients for the soil. Products that flow are thus fast-moving products, that instead of becoming waste, are resources for other products when they cease to exist (recyclable/ reusable in terms to fashion) These products move around in flows throughout the system to feed into other parts of the system. 

An example of a product that lasts in the fashion system could be a well-produced and timelessly designed leather jacket that can last for years. (good materials, and design, durable and timelessly stylish and/or functional ) 

An example of a product that flows is a garment or (mycelium) bag designed for cyclability with a biobased material. This item can be reused and safely composted at the end-of-life, in order to feed other elements in the biological system.

Fashion and fetishism

Why do clothing and fetishism often go together? How to explain clothing fetishism?

The word ‘fetishism’ has a long and very complex story. It is first used in French by Charles de Brosses, a colonist of the eighteenth century to refer to the cult that ancient pagan religions pay to material objects. These sacred material things are called fetishes. In these times, fetishism is considered to be a feature of underdeveloped civilizations and bears a negative connotation. Fetishism is perceived as a set of superstitious beliefs opposed to the rationality prevailing in the Century of Enlightenment in Europe. 

Psychoanalysis and Marxist economy have in a way extracted fetishism from its colonial anchorage. Freud observes that among his patients, some of them demonstrate a fetishist behavior: 
they have erotic desire for inanimate objects, or to be more precise, they cannot feel sexually aroused or satisfied if they miss a certain type of inanimate object. 
Freud’s interpretation is that the fetish "is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and... does not want to give up.... if a woman has been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger." So according to Freud, fetishism is a solution to the castration complex coming from childhood experience of the gender alterity.

https://www.amazon.com/Fashion-Fetishism-Corsets-Tight-Lacing-Body-Sculpture/dp/0750938080

Two questions follow then: 
1/ are there privileged objects for fetishism? 
2/ are men the only fetishists? 



Freud observes that the organs or objects chosen as substitutes for the absent female phallus are not necessarily symbols of the penis. It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in the original traumatic situation. It is as though the last impression before the traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus as Freud says, "the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic". This is why corsets, shoes and boots, underwear but also leather pieces that are often treated as a second skin, are favorite items for fetishist practices and symbols of this subculture.

https://indie-mag.com/2018/03/fetishism-in-fashion/

Because fetishism is an answer to the castration complex, it would appear at first that fetishism is strictly a masculine sort of behavior. In a recent book on fashion and fetishism, fashion historian Valerie Steele notes as well that fetishism is more widespread among men than women. But in an earlier text on fetishism, Freud said that "all women are clothes fetishists". He also adds that even the most intelligent of them follow demands of fashion, even if it is not to their advantage. It is difficult to forget the phallocentric character of the psychoanalytic take on fetishism and to go beyond these obviously misogynist reflections but it is interesting for us to discuss the possibility of an equivalent to fetishism for women, and to the specific function of fashion in this context. 

According to Freud, feminine fetishism for clothes in general has to be explained according to the woman’s quest for the phallus which is the symbol for masculine power in Freudian theory. But it would be too simple just to say that clothes are fetish for women because they make them more appealing to men.

It seems, on the opposite, that women enjoy clothes not because of the mens’ gaze, but because clothes play a role in their own identity process. Women, exactly as men, make use of fetishes to feel complete, to feel as a whole, and to conjure up the threat that the original discovery of the gender difference might have caused. But why is fashion relevant in this case? Probably because the fetish is by definition an illusion: the fetish takes the place of the missing phallus, it is a fiction about something missing. So no actual single object can really fill that void, and the subject is doomed to try one object after the other and keeps looking for the right fetish that only exists as a fantasy.

Hence the power of fashion and its constant shifts: the success of fashion is based on the fetishistic relationship to clothes. 

As we want our clothes to fill a gap that cannot be filled, we only derive partial and temporary satisfaction out of them and need new dress all the time. It is quite interesting that, from the years 1960’s on to now, mainstream fashion has adopted many of the codes of the fetishist subculture: leather, rubber, cruel shoes, tattoos, body-piercing, underwear as outerwear, corsets, which were all more or less dedicated to private and special use, became quite common on catwalks and advertising campaigns, pervading even high street fashion. Designers like Vivienne Westwood, Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier or John Galliano have contributed to put fetishist outfits on the public place, and to promote a sexual chic style that owes a lot to a sartorial material that was considered evidence for perverted habits. This long lasting fashion trend has been criticized both for degrading the woman’s image, and for spoiling the true fetish culture, making it too commercial and meaningless.

Fashion clothes are also a surface one projects her own fantasies onto: they help us to imagine other identities for ourselves, and to build new identities for ourselves. And as Freud and many other authors have established, sexual life is critical in the definition and construction of the self, so it is no mystery that clothes in general, being so intimately connected to the body, bear so many sexual connotations.

Feminist critics have attacked these uses of fetishist references as positioning women as objects or victims. It might hold in some cases, but in many others, women wearing these kinds of outfits were on the opposite pictured as dominant, strong and free. As Valerie Steele has written, "the attraction that many women have to fashion—and fetish fashion, in particular—may be related to their desire to assert themselves as independent sexual beings". It might be a good explanation, after all, for the sex appeal of the inorganic that Walter Benjamin associated to the cult of the commodities in the modern era. Fashion clothes are not only ways to cover oneself, or to express one’s personality, social role, or current mood.

FASHION: Consumption as a social marker

After focusing on the fashion industry in its productive aspect, we should look at how consumption operates as a social determinant. 
An American anthropologist, particularly known for Stone Age Economics(1974), in which he equates primitive economics with an economy of abundance, Marshall Sahlins discusses the issue of consumption and production in the fourth chapter of Cultural and Practical Reason, published in 1976. On this occasion, he studies the American food preferences and clothing system.

Production as “cultural intention”

The essence of Marshall Sahlins’ thinking resides first in his criticism of a univocal conception of the process of the merchandise simply considered under its “pecuniary quantities (exchange value)”. Historical materialism, like orthodox political economy, would share a utilitarian vision, effectively omitting the “social organization of things”. According to this logic, the consumer would only think in terms of functionality. His choice would be made in a completely rational way on the most recent object logically benefiting from the latest technical improvements. It would be this rational quest that would qualify bourgeois material happiness. However, for Sahlins, human behavior would also be guided by other parameters: “men do not merely survive”, they survive in a “definite way”. Thus, there are several types of houses, which are as many ways to “consume” a house. This is precisely what leads him to define production as “cultural intention”, and to affirm that “the material process of physical existence is organized as a meaningful process of social being”, or that “production is a functional moment of a cultural structure”. He therefore outlines the project to provide a cultural explanation of production by studying the food preferences of Americans, before focusing on their clothing system.

Consumerism and bourgeois totemism

It is from this reflection on the “cultural intention of production” that Sahlins attempts to broaden the concept of “totemism” popularized by C. Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage (1962). Criticizing him for not having transposed it to the contemporary, the anthropologist postulates for the replacement of the “totemic operator” by “species and varieties of manufactured objects, which like totemic categories, have the power of making even the demarcation of their individual owners a procedure of social classification”. In the end, capitalist society would only be an extension of this “pensée sauvage”, but this time with exchange and consumption as means of social marking. The author here takes up J. Baudrillard’s reflections, considering consumption as an exchange of meanings (besides the exchange of material goods). Goods would present themselves as “object codes for the signification and valuation of persons and occasions, functions and situations”. 


The American clothing system

M. Sahlins proposes to study the American clothing system, “a veritable map of the cultural universe”, governed by “a set of rules for declining and combining classes of clothing-form so as to formulate the cultural categories”. His aim here is to achieve a “cultural account of production”. How do the physical characteristics of the clothing object transcribe into the social space? First, it notes the existence of categories of time and place with direct reference to specific situations or activities. Thus, a garment can be used for the day, evening, winter or sport. Similarly, it may denote a person’s social class, gender or age. In this way, the use of certain materials may be perceived as “womanly” (silk), while others may be more appropriately described as “masculine” (wool). Similarly, “blue jeans” will be considered as clothing restoring an opposition between teenagers and adults, joining in the process that of a worker/capitalist.

Sahlins then notices status categories. He uses on this occasion the distinction between ceremony and workmanship clothing highlighted by T. Veblen, namely the opposition between solemnity and formality on the one hand, and utility and good service on the other. From this, the rule of “ceremonial correspondence” is established, defining the opposition between ceremonial and professional categories, applicable to any social class. In other words, for Sahlins, the “ceremony” garment would always be different from the “workmanship” garment. The evening tuxedo would be more formal than the dark work suit, itself more formal than the sports outfit, itself more formal than pajamas. He also notes the rule of “ceremonial exaggeration”, according to which the tuxedo will be more stylized than a suit, itself more stylized than the interior garment.

Finally, Sahlins tries to determine the oppositions inherent to the material characteristics of clothing objects. In texture, line and colour, he looks for elements that could mean social differences. In terms of texture, for example, the heavy would be opposed to the light, the coarse to the fine, the crunchy to the soft, all parameters signifying an individual’s age, sex, activity, class. For instance, a light, thin and soft garment would be more appropriate for Sahlins as a “feminine” garment. Similarly, clothing lines and colors would provide us with many clues about an individual’s social state. He cites, for example, a study by Maitland Graves in which the vertical line (severity, austerity, dignity) would be opposed to the horizontal line (calm, passivity, quietness).

Without spending more time on the categories drawn by Sahlins, let us retain the way he tries to systematize American clothing practices to find social meanings. While we will not share all its categories nowadays, as it is increasingly difficult to distinguish, for example, between certain “male” and “female” clothing, it must be noted that clothing is indeed a social marker, and that its consumption/production is nonetheless significant.

Consumption and identity construction

French philosopher J.P. Sartre published Being and Nothingness in 1943. Often referred to as “phenomenological ontology”, this essay invites us to question ourselves on the being of Man and to describe its fundamental structures. Composed of four parts, it is chapter II “Doing and Having” of the fourth part “Having, Doing and Being” that will interest us here. After having outlined his project of existential psychoanalysis, based, unlike Freudian psychoanalysis, on consciousness and aiming to grasp the totality of the human being through a decoding of the empirical behaviors, Sartre focuses on the important question of possession, the link between doing, having and being.


After studying the “doing”, the philosopher comes to the question of “having”. “What is meant by “to appropriate”? Or if you prefer, what do we understand by possessing an object?”, in other words, how to define possession? He proposes several key characteristics.

Possession as use?

If using an object can indeed be a sign of its possession, it cannot be irreducible to the question of use. Someone can use a cup of coffee in a brewery without being the owner of the cup. In the clothing industry, an individual can rent an outfit without owning it. Similarly, the right of destruction cannot define possession. A man may own his dog without the right to kill him, otherwise he may be concerned about the law or animal welfare associations. Possession and appropriation, in other words possession and the right of possession, must be separated. A man can indeed possess an object without appropriating it, in other words without “making it his own”, and appropriate it without possessing it. Hence Sartre’s refutation of the Proudhonian equivalence between ownership and theft (Proudhon said: “ownership is theft”), since ownership can very well be the result of theft without affecting the relationship between the thief and his new possession.

Possession as being

The object cannot therefore be defined by a total exteriority to its owner. We speak of a “possessed” man to mean that he no longer belongs to himself, that he belongs to others, that he is someone else. Sartre mentions the existence of primitive societies where people are buried with their property, where these two entities (the person and its belonging) are inseparable. Even today, objects that belonged to a dead person may still be placed in his grave to mark their indissoluble connection. The author also evokes haunted houses belonging in a sense, even after their death, still to their owners. Hence Sartre’s remark: “to be possessed means to be for someone”, which means that “the bond of possession is an internal bond of being”, that “having” finally amounts to “being”, that there is finally an equivalence what is possessed and who is possessing. The exhibition of old celebrity clothes is precisely a similar case: a jacket that once owned Jim Morrison still seems to have his memory in it.

Possession as a union

In addition, Sartre notes that the object refers to “permanence”, “non-temporality”, “substantiality” (it exists in itself) when the possessor is completely dependent on it. “To possess is to be united with the object possessed in the form of appropriation; to wish to possess is to wish to be united to an object in this relationship”. The desire to have is the same as the desire to be. I do not only want jeans, I want to unite with them to form a single entity. I am therefore composed of the self and the not-self (jeans). Thus, the person is in a way the purpose of the object he owns. The original notion of luxury that haute couture exemplifies, also testifies to this. A dress is made for me, so the dress has no other purpose, no other possible purpose than to be worn by me.

Possession as a continuous creation

For Sartre, the act of purchase also amounts to an act of creation. In fact, the wearer gives meaning to the garment purchased. He contextualizes it, actualizes it in the middle of other clothes, etc. My jeans are not just any jeans, it’s the way I use them. My jeans are the way I use them, the way I interact with them (personalization, how to roll them up, etc.). The object cannot make sense without my act of use, without a relationship of appropriation. But what I create for Sartre is “me”. He notes that “the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I touch in this cup, in this trinket”.

Also, the relationship of possession cannot be anything other than a continuous creation. If the object is placed under my dependence, there is no less of it by itself. The object therefore exists without me (in itself) and by me. A certain univocity of the relationship is found here. It is still my usage that defines possession. Jeans are irrelevant if they are simply placed on a hanger. To own them, I have to wear them, wear them out, patch them, etc. Sartre notices the alienation of the possessor, who cannot exist outside the possessed object. The object belongs to me but it remains independent, or “originally in itself”.

The infinity of possession

The relationship to an individual’s possession is thus defined as “symbolic and ideal”. The consumption of a possession is continuous. It seems impossible for Sartre to achieve possession all at once. He takes the example of the bicycle. If it only takes one act of purchase to own it, this act is accompanied by multiple gestures: I touch it, contemplate it, then drive with it to get the bread, before going on a tour of France, etc. In the case of buying a jacket, I can simply contemplate it on a hanger, but I very quickly have to touch it, to wear it, otherwise I won’t appropriate it. Thus its use remains uninterrupted. And since I’m going to die, I can’t help but exhaust his consumption. 
But destruction and deterioration are also an appropriation. I can’t have an object in itself, I destroy it somehow to make it my own. I wear out my clothes, I alter and destroy them little by little, but at the same time I take them over. The deterioration can therefore sometimes be synonymous with enjoyment, especially in the clothing industry. This gives prestige to certain raw jeans that are worn, perforated, frayed, etc. The object is then marked by consumption, by appropriation, and therefore by possession. Sartre draws a parallel with the elegance of G. Brummel and his hatred of the new.


“To possess the world”

Finally, the philosopher focuses on the meaning of possession: “What then is it which we seek to appropriate?” To possess is to want to appropriate at the abstract level what he calls the “the mode of being of an object as the actual being of this object”, i.e. its existence as a solitary object devoid of my use, but also, at the empirical level, its extensions, i.e. the possibility of use that I can make of it. Owning jeans is both owning jeans, in that it belongs to a specific category of trousers (jeans are not formal pants), but also owning their possibilities of use (wearing it, etc.). Basically, possession is defined as the synthesis between these two particularities. “Each possessed object which raises itself on the foundation of the world, manifests the entire world (…). To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world symbolically.” Sartre mentions his experience with tobacco, and his fear of losing the flavor of events such as a dinner or a show, by quitting smoking. Finally, the act of smoking was for him to achieve a destructive appropriation function of tobacco, meaning an appropriate destruction of the whole world. Consuming an object would therefore, according to Sartre, amount to consuming it individually, but also to consuming the world. “To possess is to wish to possess the world across a particular object.”

To conclude, if desire refers at the same time to the desire to be and the desire to have, these two are distinct, although they are inseparable in daily life. The first is related to for-itself, when “the desire to have aims at the for-itself on, in and through the world”. 
Consumption choices therefore reflect a certain way of being in the world. The purchase of one garment among others is not insignificant, translating “symbolically to our perception a certain way which being has of giving itself”.

Fashion business models

 at an industry level, we can see that fashion is a sector that is a kind of epitome of globalization. Every country in the world is more or less positioned as a customer or supplier for other countries, and the integration of countries is very strong in the sector. This is due to the fact that, in fashion, you have quite low technical barriers to entry, and very low cost countries such as China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, can position themselves in the sector quite easily. Because they have a lot of work force also, and since it's a quite labor intensive industry, they have been able to reach a very strong position in this sector during the last few years.

the geography of the sector evolves a lot due to the evolution also of the global players that have a very global strategy both in terms of sourcing and distribution. So, in fact, the landscape evolves very fast. At the company level, one can think that it's very easy to enter in a fashion business. Since the cost of entry is quite low, with some money you can easily produce a collection or create your shop, online for instance. You can believe that there are low barriers to entry in this sector. In fact, it's quite wrong to think that, since you have both economic barriers to entry, and symbolic. For instance, if you think about the mass market business, it's really a lot about being competitive price-wise. So, to do that and to achieve this kind of competitiveness, you need to produce a certain volume and you need to invest a lot at the beginning to attain this kind of competitiveness. If you think of other kinds of positioning, in the luxury creative field for instance, you have other kinds of barriers to entry which are more about symbolic. So you need, in fact, to position your brand and to send to the market signals that your proposition is credible and you have very strong creative potential. To do that, you have to work with certain companies, you have to be recognized by certain bodies. In fact you don't choose to position yourself in the sector, you are accepted as part of it, but it's very hard to enter. At the end of the day, customers will pay for the brand and the stronger the brand is, the bigger the mark-up is. If you're a very emerging brand, if you buy a piece of clothes at 100 euros, you will be able to sell it at let's say 200. If you're a very strong luxury brand, you will be able to sell it much more, at a much higher price than that. It's really highly connected to the strengths of the brand.That's why companies develop strategies to both, protect and expand, the strength of the brand, through their search for legitimacy, through the fact that they produce lots of creation, that are not meant to be sold, but just to testify of the creative strength of the brand. Selective distribution is something key for creative and luxury brands, because they want to select the people that are allowed to sell their products. Again, in this idea of creating a brand asset, you have lots of very concrete strategies that are set up by companies.

During the last 30 years, we've seen the growth, amazing growth, of retail chains, that have changed the landscape in the fashion sector in every country in the world, both in the US, in Europe, in Asia. These kinds of players have achieved very strong performances due to a unique business model which helped them to gain market shares, against more traditional forms of businesses, such as independent retailers or traditional brands. In fact, they control a big part of the supply chain, and they also search a lot for competitiveness through a global sourcing, and through the fact that they are very concentrated, and they are able to have a very strong bargaining power against their partners.  they achieve this kind of performance through this kind of tools, of economic tools, and in fact if you take a look at the market share in terms of players today, retail chains represent roughly between 30 and 50 percent of the market. There is a big concern today regarding sustainability, regarding the fact that this model that has been very powerful during the last decades is sustainable in long term, and that customers are still willing to pay the cost of this organization. And moreover, with the digital revolution, we see more agile and more modern business model starting to emerge. That's potentially the new business model, the new successful business model that is appearing today.

There is a huge diversity in terms of business models. Historically, it was easier because you had some companies who were very specialized in creation, others in manufacturing, others in retailing. And today, we can say that you have many models that combine these different elements in their proper way. You can have brands that are today ensuring directly in the retail scene, and don't rely on multi-brand or department stores. You have retailers that integrate the creative process and sometimes even manufacturing. So, what we can say is, in general, the more you control the supply chain, the stronger you are. If you are a digital native vertical brand, if you are a retailer, it's very interesting to control the major part of the process. There are lots of new designers, new brands emerging every year, every season, so to gain this visibility which is, of course, something you have to achieve, it's quite complex. You have both challenges in terms of visibility, of market access, and also in the upstream field your ability to be produced. Because there is, again, a lot of competition to access manufacturers. They require minimum quantities to produce.  if you're a small player, in general, you are not served the first, it's the biggest brands, biggest players that are produced earlier than you, which is very tough in the field of fashion because if you arrive on the market later than the others, you have a good chance that your collection will not work because others will have been able to sell earlier than you. For instance, for creative labels, it's very complex because they show their creation very early in the season, and they sell very late.In terms of distribution and communication you need to take a look at what's happening in retail, in the press, the traditional partners for emerging brands which were multi-brand formats, such as independent retailers, or department stores, are struggling, so they have less and less access to this kind of partners. And in terms of press also, the support for emerging designers is more and more complex. The press is facing major changes too, so lots of brands today choose to talk directly to the customer through social networks, for instance, rather than rely on traditional PR strategies. The digital revolution adds a new chapter to globalization. It's something that leads to more transparency among the processes across the world, that helps you to reach new categories of customers. It's something that, again, increases the globalization of the sector. And what we see, as something very potentially very strong for newcomers, is their ability to use the data they can gather through the different digital tools they use, and to be more agile today than they were in the past, to be able to reply to all the market changes we are observing at a faster and faster pace. We see that, for instance, the model that we knew of fast fashion retailer, is maybe, can be beaten by new models, which will be able to have the same probably, the same ability to reply to trends, or to anticipate them, but at a lower social cost for instance, because there will be more agile and more able to track all that's happening in the supply chain for them. Potentially, we can see new players emerging which will combine the two elements in terms of sustainability, but also the taste for customers for new products and creation.

fashion: The particularities of the "fashion code"

Former student of H. Blumer and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of San Diego, Fred Davis published Fashion, Culture, and Identity in 1992. This book allows him to compare two models of fashion diffusion, namely what he calls the “populist model” based on the consumer and the “fashion system model” oscillating between Simmelian and Blumerian approaches. In addition, he focuses in Chapter 1 “Do clothes speak? What makes them fashion? ”on the recurrent parallel between fashion and language.

Sharing E. Sapir’s analyses of the difficult appreciation of fashion signs, and those of G. McCracken which we have just studied before, F. Davis proposes to study the “code” of dress, based on Umberto Eco’s reading. Thus, the dress code would be different from the code as used in cryptography or in a language, to refer instead to an “incipient” or even a “quasi-code” with certain reading ambiguities.
Fred Davis proposes to define three particularities of the fashion code, namely its strong dependence on context, the plurality of possible interpretations, and the necessary “undercoding” it implies:

1. Depending on the wearer, the moment, the place, the meaning of the garment is intimately dependent on the context in which it works. 

2. The meaning of clothing depends on the receiver of the clothing message. The exaggeration of the shoulder proportions of the 1980s, for example, could be interpreted very differently depending on whether the observer perceives an appropriation of masculinity or, on the contrary, its parody. 

3. The variability of interpretations implies a “undercoding” operation on the part of the receiver, occurring “when in the absence of reliable interpretative rules persons presume or infer, often unwittingly, on the basis of such hard-to-specify cues as gesture, inflection, pace, facial expression, context, and setting, certain molar meanings in a text, score, performance, or other communication”. Thus, although the garment may call for a rather clear “undercoding”, as in the case of the uniform, it is nevertheless more generally an “aesthetic code” than the code applied to the “conventional sign codes” present in speech or writing (ambiguity vs. subtlety).

As part of an “aesthetic code”, the meaning of clothing can also differ according to its “qualities”, in other words according to the fabric, color or cut. In this sense, for Fred Davis, the meaning of clothing depends on its cultural context. However, he notes the propensity of wearers to often invoke the same images or associations. Thus, even if an actor deviates from the dominant meanings, the message will be globally captured. The sociologist takes here the example of hippie hair. Appearing as a sign of sexual liberation for her carrier, other passers-by may consider her a “perverse androgyny”.

But how to define the fashion phenomenon? Starting from the observation of the difficulties of traditional definitions in grasping fashion differently from simple dress practice in a given society, Fred Davis proposes to consider the phenomenon at the level of communication as “some alteration in the code of visual conventions by which we read meanings of whatever sort and variety into the clothes we and our contemporaries wear”, any change being perceived as “the introduction, the retrevial, or the different accenting” of “signifiers”.

Like McCracken, Fred Davis seems to defend the idea that clothing cannot be considered as a language, preferring to use the term of “code”.

What is the expressive nature of clothing?

That fashion or clothes are expressive is another way to say that they are signs. One of the most striking theory on clothes as sign has been formulated by the philosopher, theologian and mathematician Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. The context of Pascal ‘s argument is religious: Pascal argues that without God, man is doomed to a miserable existence, which the search for "entertainment" cannot compensate, to wandering and sin. This misery is mainly caused by the human capacity of imagination: "that mistress of error and falsity". Imagination, according to Pascal, is a "power": it refers to the mental faculty of visualizing material things in their absence. This faculty is extremely useful for the individual as it allows him to surpass the immediate empiric experience of the world. Without Imagination, most of knowledge is unattainable.This perspective allows Pascal to form a theory on clothing: the morphological characteristics of the garment are only relevant if they manifest a character trait of the wearer. The garment becomes a "sign". Things that are the object of sensation can, through imagination, become the sign of other things, that are not actually felt by the individual. In other words, imagination stand also as the ability to interpret a tangible reality. Tangible appearances govern our judgement: to demonstrate his theory, Pascal considers the example of a senator whose competence is measured according to his external aspect and his zeal, while his argument and his verdict are the same. Reason is powerless here: it has no arguments to object to the impact of appearances and to the associations led by our imagination. Imagination has its "clevers", whom, with a clear perspective on the power of appearances, act according to the expected effects of their behavior on others’ imagination. Pascal addresses the expressive nature of fashion within this specific framework. We demonstrated that garments are a sign sent by the wearer to the social group, regarding his identity: doctors dress as doctors, and judges as judges. The social function of clothing is neither protection nor the ornament, but rather the expression of a message. This idea of an "expressive garment" is familiar: we usually suppose that clothing choices reflect intentions of meaning (an outfit is chosen in order to communicate a certain representation of the person wearing it). Typically, if we say that Pierre is wearing a pair of "sneakers" with a suit, it means that he has the freedom to ignore constraining formal codes. However, Pascal’s argument is not limited to his observation of garment as a communication tool. The fashion statements he addresses, such as "I am a doctor", are systematically wrong: "if doctors really owned the art of healing, they would never wear squared beanies."

Clothes appear as "vain instruments" through which one can obtain "respect": In the absence of any real justice or medical science, the garment makes the judge or the doctor, and no one cares to object as the merits cannot be appreciated for themselves, in a world where imagination replaced knowledge "and disposes of everything". The Pascalian critic of fashion is essentially made on a moralistic level, with a tragic and metaphysic dimension: criticizing society for dwelling into a futile obsession for "disguise" is to believe that we can still reach something beyond the mere image. The main issue is, for Pascal, that this "second nature" induced by appearances cannot be overlooked: in a world without God, only the signs remains, as what they refer to is lost for the sinner. Let’s try to push this further and ignore the moral or religious sentence that dress is a cosmetic lie. Back in the twentieth century, we find Roland Barthes, literary critic and semiologist, with the project to demonstrate "the structrural analysis of the female garment". Barthes does not ask anymore about the truth of fashion statements. He rather asks about their meaningfulness. Barthes’s hypothesis is to translate fashion as a language, following Troubetskoi, Flugel and Kiener prior body of work.Barthes assumes that the garment cannot be reduced to its protective or ornamental functions, but is part of a system of signs. Unlike Pascal, Barthes does not refer to the actual garment, but to the "written garment", which is described in "fashion literature". Barthes’s subject is not textile, it is textual. This choice, explained by the author in the preface of "The Fashion System", is dictated by the author personal preference towards the written material. Fashion magazines work as axiomatics, establishing each season a clothing "lexicon", namely a code linking between the various items of a wardrobe ("this suit") and their properties ("blue") and concepts ("youth"). Barthes itemizes the characteristics of the "communication system" at the heart of fashion.This system is defined by three particularities: The first particularity is the indeterminacy of the link between the  linguistic signifier and its signified, in contrast with the common language. This first particularity is explainedby the second: the relationship between the signifier and the signified is quotationnal. The fashion discourse grants an expressive nature to the fabrics and embroideries, which we are free to ignore if we remain strangers to the prescriptions of fashion literature. This type of rhetoric involve two levels of language, and finds itself, according to Barthes, "straddling on language (clothing shapes) and meta-language (fashion literature)". Barthes refers to a linguistic distinction or a more general logic according to which there is a plurality of languages, organized by their expressive capacity. A meta-language is defined by its relationship with a language-object, explaining its structure and functioning.

This meta language has to be at least as expressive as the language-object (French, for instance, is it’s own meta-language) and contains a quotation function (for example, quotation marks) that allows to mention the expressions of the aforementioned language-object ("snow" is a name within the English metalanguage for the word "snow" in the English language-object). What Barthes means to explain is the fact that fashion literature is a meta-language that defines the meaning conditions of the actual worn garments, adressed as the expressions of a language-object. Finally, the third and last particularity is the "signifying relationship" given under "an analytic form". It is the consequence of the second particularity of the fashion speech, to fuse together the two levels of the language-objet and the meta-language: as the fashion speech integrates "the text and its lexicon", the signifying elements are immediately recognizable, as they are determined according to the meta-language’s axioms or definitions. Barthes’s interest for the fashion language can be explained by the semiologist’s fascination for fashions’ arbitrary nature: each year, the same signifiers are allocated different signifieds. Barthes focuses on fashion literature’s tendency to conceal the conventional nature of the signs it projects on garments : either it "presents its signified (fashion, softness, spring etc) as inner qualities of the forms it quotes", or "it reduced the signified to a simple utilitarian function (a coat for travelling)". This transformation of the "linguistic status of the garment" into a "natural or utilitarian status" recycles a marxist approach of fashion : it diverts functional objects from their real use value, to turn them into the sign ("fetishes") of an exchange value artificially established by the capitalist system. In other words, if fashion can only be comprehended through writing, and does not exist without the support of fashion magazines, it is because of the capitalist economy need for "mythologies", "in order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness", and make him buy an image instead of an actual product. From different perspectives, Pascal and Barthes agree on the imaginary power of fashion and clothing, and both of them formulate a moral critic about them.

https://artteca.com/blogs/artteca/why-you-should-express-yourself-through-fashion

That our outfits can express our moods, our social positions or our beliefs seems quite obvious. The study of how one can use clothes to achieve meaning is more difficult and is the object of a separate video this week. But right now, our topic is slightly different. We will not focus on individuals using fashion as a language. We will examine to what extent fashion as a whole can be considered a creative language. Fashion is generally categorized as a creative industry. At a very basic level, it means that fashion design is not only concerned with technical parameters like the clothes’ comfort or their wearable character, but also, and primarily with how they look, with their aesthetic properties. But fashion cannot be reduced to the crafting of garments that are pleasant to our senses. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, fashion designers like Paul Poiret have considered that not only clothes but also furniture or fragrances were part of their work. Poiret was also involved in the staging of his products in his own couture house, in window displays, and in parties he was famous for. He also was eager to have his many artist friends help him to communicate about his dresses through albums, pictures, and illustrations. Poiret was obsessed not only by the material things he was designing but also with the image through which people would discover them. This attitude has become quite common among fashion designers, who are generally credited with a complete creative universe where dressmaking is only a part. The evolution of fashion shows over the twentieth Century, from catalogues in motion taking place in the couture house premises, to spectacular events in most prestigious venues, is also an example of the ambition of fashion to articulate a message beyond the clothes. Fashion blends craftsmanship and entertainment, and it is difficult to assess, between actual products and images, which are the most important. If fashion is now established as an art in itself, it is also because it has succeeded in articulating strong statements about the world. After all, a creative language uses aesthetic means not only to please its audience, but also to deliver some kind of truths. This is exactly what the fashion historian Caroline Evans shows in Fashion at the Edge, a book published in 2003. Evans focuses on a small set of fashion designers she calls "experimental" and that includes Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto or Hussein Chalayan. According to her, this group has significantly changed the social and cultural relevance of fashion.

Their works differ in many respects, but share a critical inspiration: they are dark, sometimes even sinister, ironic, they contest the genders’ usual attributes, and they create sometimes unfinished or deconstructed pieces of clothing. Their play on proportions, their use of weird fabrics, their taste for gothic or nightmarish references suggest that these designers ignore the conventions of good taste and somehow prefer ugliness to canonical beauty. Evans writes that "on the edge of discourse, of 'civilization', of speech itself, experimental fashion can act out what is culturally hidden". In other words, these designers’ work say something disturbing about the world they live in. They show traumatized bodies, in complete contrast to the celebration of modernity, progress and self-accomplishment that more mainstream fashion tends to represent. According to Caroline Evans, these desires and fears are not necessarily those of the designers themselves. As she writes, "if fashion speaks, it speaks independently of its creators". Fashion, with its constant transformation, is a mirror of society’s deep concerns. In the years these experimental designers have emerged, a lot of anxiety was confusingly experienced in western societies where several economic and moral crises burst at the same time. Fashion’s creativity lies in its capacity to make buried feelings and thoughts come into light. In this way it is very similar to other artistic forms of expression. But the particularity of fashion is that its language is determined by its temporal indexicality: by definition, fashion points at the present time and its features. Fashion speaks of the ‘now’: whatever it says, it is always about the temporal context of its enunciation. This is why fashion designers are sometimes perceived as oracles or prophets: they have to feel and interpret the deepest moves of our culture, and translate them into collections and images that will set the tone and give a clear shape to the present.

Brands as creative languages

How to define creation? How does a big fashion house work?

if we talk about creation in the fashion industry, you have a creative person. Why is this person creative, a real creative person? I'm not talking about creative managers. All of us, we are creative during the day, we can have good ideas. But let's talk about real creativity. Those designers that are considered as real creatives, bringing something new, a breakthrough in the fashion. And you have to see their history, their origin. Sometimes, the less bourgeois you are, and the better you can be creative. Because you observe, when you are a young person, you observe the world outside, and this develops your creativity, because your imagination goes beyond day to day reality. 

This is why some think in fashion it's, even more, it's different from music or, more similar to music maybe but, it's how to have the intuition of what will be tomorrow, or just tomorrow. By that, I mean that Mr. Dior used to say "you have to hear the wind in the trees", and the moment, and what we have today, the same story. You know, the young, they follow very quickly the change. Over 30, or over sometimes even 25, you have your daily life, and then, you resist to the change. So whoever is a creative person has to feel the trend that they will invent. They don't follow some institutes giving you the trend of colors, this is not the case. For Dior, Chanel, Givenchy it goes beyond their creativity, they have created a house and then, became a brand, thanks to the designers coming after, and maintaining the heritage with a twist, with a very creative to keep it, to attract the new generation. Their role was global, obviously. Mr. Dior was doing everything, from the couture, then the "prêt-à-porter". He was global in terms of products and he was global in terms of geography. He went to the U.S in August after the first show in February 1947, the famous "New Look". He could not go himself to Japan in 1954, but he had the first house in Daimaru.

https://www.vogue.com/article/john-galliano-dior-alexander-mcqueen-givenchy-brit-invasion

Then, the creative of today, he has to deal with the "première", he has to deal with the atelier, about couture, "prêt-à-porter", accessories. He has to think about the communication. The first act being the show. And immediately after the show, the campaign, the advertising. But today, even social media before the show, during the show, after the show. Windows, interior design of the store. If you hire a designer to work for a brand, you have to be sure of the fit between it's a triangle: the designer, the brand and the management philosophy of the company. It's like selecting a partner in life. You know, designing for a big brand, a big house, is not "they are free, you give them a lot of freedom, and so on". But there is "you're building something with some constraints". The key has been also to hire, for those brands with heritage, the right designer able to understand "l'air du temps", the moment to create a fashion momentum, and respecting the heritage. And this is something only few of them can do. Because, if you ignore the heritage, you can be successful at one point. It can last two years, three years, four years. you go into a pure fashion moment,  And you see the collection of the designer has nothing to do with the heritage. Go "disruptive" as they say today, being "disruptive". It's a word that everybody is using. But more disruptive than Mr. Dior himself, or maybe Coco Chanel before, or Mr. Givenchy, when you read the stories of Saint Laurent. There were not storytelling, they were doing the story, different. And, when you bring those new creative people, if you have a big name, the respect of the name, but without being in the past, because if you only spend your time, your day, in the archive, you reproduce it, so you're doing vintage. So the creativity is important and for some, those geniuses like John Galliano or McQueen for instance, who has been at Givenchy, they were taking the archive but played it. John did the first show for Dior,with a "la veste Bar", but with the skirt in crocodile. Black and white, but some details making it so modern. And what Clare (Waight Keller) is doing today is the same. This is the most difficult thing to do. To give new energy, momentum, and respecting the roots. But again the roots, they are the roots, but you need the tree, and you need flowers on the tree, and this is the mission of the designer. This is the case of Dior, the bar, the cannage". But those values, each designer can bring his own vision. After Dior, Saint Laurent, Bohan, Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, Maria Grazia, and they all go with their own interpretation. This is what I call an open system, it's open. Mr. Dior himself was open. They could bring contribution, and this is a different approach.

The perspectives of fashion design

what's central in fashion is the person. That's a huge difference. Because that's also going to work with the more economical part of fashion as well. Because then we're going to speak about the target, who is going to be wearing these things, or using these things. Quite often, when a designer is going to work without a notion of the body in there, we get quite weird results. 

Sometimes, when we get approached by designers to join the program, and we get that feeling that the body is not there, they're just making objects that people can wear, but not really are working together with a person in it, then we would rather guide them towards accessories, or to other fields as well. It's a wide scope of competencies and skills that a designer in fashion needs today, even more than before, They have to be skilled technically, they have to understand volume, color, materials. Then, a designer has a notion of time management. They have to be able to draw. There are a lot of digital tools that can help you work around, a lot of photoshop going around. drawing is an easy and quite direct medium to express what one could do and is want to do. Image is taking over a huge part of the the lecture of fashion. I happen to come across quite some people who actually are running their fittings even through their camera, through their phone, looking say "okay I'm fitting your jumper. How is it looking? How will it look on Instagram? How will it look on social media? I don't see that enough. Can we change that a little bit? This is not working. Can we change it?". 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, we would actually work right away on the piece, and now there is this screen in the middle. Because we live a lot of things, we experience a lot of things, through the screen. Which gives another thing about screens, as well, is today a lot of things are happening in front. If you look to a collection on a screen, you mainly see the front. So, nothing is happening in the back. That gives a kind of completely different vision of fashion, while actually we spoke about the body before as being important in what we're doing. So, body means three dimensions and going around it. But then, the screen is two dimensions. in a way, like influencing each other. 

The main challenges for a fashion designer, a young fashion designer, today in the fashion world... Fashion business today is crowded. There's a lot of things going around. There's a lot of things existing today. There are huge brands taking a lot of space today, having a lot of power, a lot of possibilities and opportunities. Still, the last couple of years again, there is room for niche brands. There's room for other things. There's room for young designers who are trying, who are wanting to show, who find again this entrepreneurship vibe. we happen to come across, and there is so much competition going on. It's very difficult for a young designer. We're living in a world where it's possible for anyone to communicate, but there's so much communication going around that still the difficulty is to be seen and to be watched, to be understood, and to find your final customers, or target, or goal in the end. To be successful is to be is to be outstanding in its initial meaning of the world: standing out of the crowd. It can be a detail in the end, but what would make that this would stand out. The need for a designer is just to understand what's existing, what is working with other brands, without applying the recipe if there is one, and to try out something else at one way or another. But the biggest part where we would see things changing today, lately, is to become team players. the younger generation, they are ready, they understand, they are willing to become team players and to become... they have to work as a group as well. They don't have, or less, that identity or that identity issue about "I did it, and it's my name, and I want to sign it". They're happy to work together, they're happy to come up with a common project as well.

fashion: is fashion a language? a code?

fashion: is fashion a language? a code?

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.

https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/shopping/souvenir-jacket-a-brief-history-and-where-to-shop-for-sukajan-in-tokyo

 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.