FASHION: activism

 Activism is about doing something for a cause and to bring about change. The cause might be one directly experienced by an activist, but it can also be about acting in solidarity with other people who are experiencing injustice.

Activism can be local, national or even global. It can include everyday spontaneous actions, large-scale, organised responses and everything in between.

Activism also takes many forms. American political scientist Gene Sharp grouped 198 non-violent action methods into three types. The first category is non-violent protest and persuasion. This includes formal statements, banners, picketing, wearing of symbols, vigils, performances, marching, teaching and walk-outs. The second category is social non-cooperation. This involves strikes, boycotts, ostracism of people, and disobeying social customs. The third category is non-violent intervention which covers sit-ins, non-violent occupations, fasting, establishing new social patterns and overloading administrative systems.

https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/07Anderson.html

These three categories aren’t fixed and definitive. However, they can help us think about different kinds of activism, and see activism in multiple forms.

We can’t be definitive about what makes activism successful, as there are so many kinds and so many causes.

https://aninjusticemag.com/fast-fashion-brands-are-showing-us-what-performative-allyship-looks-like-19c67ce03284

Solidarity and Allyship

https://www.elle.com/culture/a34763375/anti-racism-industry-profile/

Solidarity, at its best, is about working with people to challenge the injustice they face, rather than assuming what they need. We can have the greatest intentions to support people, but there is a risk we can miss what people really need.
Working as an ally is one way to work in solidarity. Allyship has gained prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement

COUNTER FASHION

“the practice of dressing to express shared political beliefs”. 

They make clear the distinction between counter-fashion and anti-fashion, with the latter defined as “an umbrella term for various styles of dress which are explicitly contrary to the fashion of the day”. Counter-fashion is one way of using clothes as a form of self-authorship 

counter-fashion has been used for centuries in many different historical movements. Starting in the late 1700s with the French Revolution and the sans-culottes, we are then introduced to Victorian feminist dress reform in the 1800s. We look at the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and conclude with Tute Bianche in the 1990s.

nowadays we have movements such as  the one by Katharine Hamnett London, infamous for campaign slogan t-shirts such as ‘CHOOSE LIFE’, ‘BE ANTI-RACIST’ and ‘CHOOSE LOVE’. Each of these designs was made for a specific cause with profits going to further the work of relevant charities and organisations.

Another example is the Pussyhat Project™. The Pussyhat Project is a social movement focused on raising awareness about women’s issues and advancing human rights by promoting dialogue and innovation through the arts, education and intellectual discourse. The Pussyhat is a symbol of support and solidarity for women’s rights and political resistance. Caroline Stevenson is Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion. In this short clip, Caroline highlights the Pussyhat as a demonstration of how fashion can be “highly meaningful and politically charged”.

https://youtu.be/M3CLfKqIkDk

or the Rational Dress Society and the "jumpsuit", which is the ungendered monogarment for everyday wear. They propose that you throw away all your clothes and replace them with a jumpsuit, the universal garment. 

Jumpsuit is disseminated in two ways. It’s a pre-made garment for purchase and an open-source pattern, which is available to download free of charge. And jumpsuit comes in over 300 individual sizes that you can download the pattern for. The garment uses something called anthropometry, which is just the study of human measurements, to develop all of our sizing. 

 it is ungendered, which is different than unisex. In a unisex garment– typically, there is a single garment that can be worn by a number of individuals. this takes a slightly different approach using anthropometry so there remove than 300 sizes.

The garment that embraces the differences between bodies but has a manufactured sameness between individuals. different garments for different sizes, weather you are tall short, thin, curvy, male or female. garments would fit in the same way. so there is a manufactured sameness between everybody. 

The jumpsuit is a response to the rise of fast fashion. Fast fashion is a movement that came out of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s in which deregulation led to the rise of multinational corporations with complex international supply chains.

The rise of these corporations and fast fashion meant that clothes could be produced at increasingly rapid paces and in much greater quantities. And so our clothes now are much cheaper and more widely available than they were in the 1970s. So traditional fashion is defined by a six-month production cycle, from the moment that a designer thinks of an idea to the moment that garment is being sold on store shelves. Fast fashion is typically defined as an accelerated production cycle in which clothes are being made in a two to three-week time period. So the result of this is that we have radically more amounts of clothes than we did before.

For example, one statistic  from 2015 cited that the company Zara alone produces 1.23 million individual garments per day. So in a system like this where we’re being asked to buy more and more, the strategy of industry, in order to compel us to keep buying or keep us inside this consumer cycle, is to create garments using a model of planned obsolescence. So these fast-fashion garments are deliberately made to fall apart, which compels us to then go back to the store and buy more of them. According to industry standards, the company H&M says that their garments are meant to retain their value for no more than 10 wash cycles. So this leads to the feeling that we get where we buy a garment. We’re excited about it. We’re happy about it. We wear it once. We wash it a couple times. And then all of the sudden, it doesn’t really fit us in the same way, or it doesn’t quite fit us right, right? And so we end up in this paradoxical situation where our closets are overflowing with clothes, but we feel like we have nothing to wear.

neoliberal economic policies that have produced something like fast fashion and produced moments where you are getting dressed for something, and you’re standing in front of your closet, which is brimming with clothing, and yet you feel like you have nothing to wear, right? And so that’s fashion, right? And so we needed to understand what was fashion and then what we consider, ourselves, as counter-fashion. So instead of being anti-fashion, which is a wholesale rejection, we are instead counter-fashion, which means that we’re moving parallel or thinking about new models or new ways of dressing and what it is that our clothes might signify. And with fashion, we tie it very much to rapid stylistic change and the type of rapid, really deeply accelerated stylistic change that comes about within capitalist modes of production. So in the 1850s, we see the invention of the sewing machine. Maybe it takes 14 hours to stitch a man’s shirt by hand. Suddenly, it goes from 14 hours to one.

And we see the beginning of this rapid acceleration, which has only intensified under deregulation policies that have allowed stores like H&M, or Zara, Mango, etc  producing billions of garments a year. 

clothing often signifies social differences such as hierarchy, it can be used in movements, creating a kind of solidarity or a kind of visual bond. 

We can first really see counter-fashion coming out of the French Revolution in the late 1700s with a movement called the sans-culotte. The sans-culotte were a revolutionary movement of working-class people. And the phrase sans-culotte means without culottes. Culottes were silk, knee-high breeches that were worn by the aristocrats.

working class didn’t wear these silk knee breeches. They wore trousers. And so as the French Revolution gained steam, more and more people started deliberately adopting trousers as a signal of their solidarity with the working class. So they were refusing high fashion in order to align themselves politically with the Revolutionary forces in France. 

So fashion can be about reinforcing social hierarchies, wearing what's trendy, &  fashionable, certain luxury brands etc for this you need money. 

The sans-culotte due to the counter-fashion movement of this period became a symbol for the common man, the working-class ethos, and the fraternal spirit of the French Revolution.

later we end up with the Bloomer outfit and feminist dress reform.  starting with Amelia Bloomer donning what she was calling the Turkish dress - feminist dress reform, these women believed that the women’s clothing created what they called a slave-like mentality, or a slave mentality (corsets heavy skirts petticoats etc) . due to the fashion impracticalities it wasn’t physically possible for women to earn equal wages with men just because their petticoats weighed too much - 

physically was not possible. And so they wanted to create a new kind of dress that was more freeing, that allowed women to participate more fully and economically and just in life, generally. in 1851, Amelia Bloomer adopts this dress. And she publishes the pattern in the temperance journal The Lily, which we cite as one of the first open-source dress-reform garments, she wears this garment for a handful of years. But just the mere sight of discernible female legs in public was too much. in historical letters we see she wrote many letters stating that she basically was getting screamed at all the time, so it was unfortunately a fairly short-lived experiment. But it’s another moment of political and sartorial solidarity. 

next, in the 1920s, we have a fashion that comes from the Soviet avant-garde, from a fashion designer named Varvara Stepanova. She was a fashion and textile designer, and she was a communist, after the Russian Revolution, her and a bunch of other designers and artists, who were known as the constructivists, set about to create design for the new communist reality.  Stepanova was asking herself, if we want to create a different way of living, maybe we should create a different way of dressing? And so she came up with this theory of fashion that she called production dress, which emphasised utility and functionality of garments and also eliminated both gender and class distinctions in garments. So she made these really incredible unisex rompers that were covered in these geometric forms so that people wearing the garments would be seen, in motion, as these moving geometric paintings. So Stepanova’s idea for production dress was that instead of designing garments that would be made for pre-existing identity positions in the way that you might go to a department store and go to the junior section or the men’s section or the women’s section, instead, she would make clothes that were defined by shared activity or shared labour.

she also made a lot of sportswear. She made workwear. She made clothes for theatre and culture and art with the idea was that you and I, engaged in a similar endeavour, working together. We were playing together– our clothes would be able to bring us together instead of separating us out into pre-existing identity categories. 

The next big fashion we see making a statement was in the 1960s with the resurgence of counter-fashion, which was really part of broader countercultural movements happening at this time across the world - Black Panther Party.

the Black Panther Party was a political organisation, in the US, active between the mid ’60s and the early ’80s. They combined Black nationalist ideology with socialist politics, their 10-point programme included the right to defend the Black community from police brutality and advocated for access to education, housing, and also employment. The members of the Black Panther Party adopted a common uniform consisting of a black leather jacket, black pants or a miniskirt, a black beret, and also boots. The use of the colour black derived from the 1960s Black is Beautiful movement.  a celebration of the African-American body as well as a call for positive representation. 

 

The beret references both the military uniform of the Cuban Revolutionary Che Guevara, and also the Green Berets, which is an elite military unit in the US. And one of the things that’s interesting about the Black Panther Party uniform is that, by design, any member of the community could access it, because it was all available at department stores, so it was readily available for everyone.

In the1990s we see the Tute Bianche, which was an Italian protest garment. 

The Tute Bianche were a group of Italian youths who took to the street to protest their economic and disenfranchisement. These were precarious workers, part-timers, freelancers, service-industry employees who had no retirement funds or pensions or union representation. They donned  white coveralls in reference to the blue coveralls of the old working class. They wore white, instead, to convey their ghostly status, they saw themselves as people who were forgotten by capitalism and forgotten by society at large. Over time, they added padding and wore football helmets to protect themselves against the police. And their anti-capitalist actions peaked at the G8 Summit, where one member was murdered by a police officer. Tute Bianche member Robert Boy said, “We’re wearing the white overalls so that other people wear it. We’re wearing the white overall so that we can take it off someday.”

 historical fashion movements that have happened in the past, can be  very inspiring for what can happen in the future. 

FASHION AND SOCIETY: the 3 ecologies

The powers of fashion are beyond consumerism, through fashion as an expanded practice,  we can help its users to share capabilities and engage in more open processes of mutual acknowledgement and discovery. To shy from fashion intersecting with various forms of injustices that can be used to play a part in processes of exclusion and bullying. So how to do this?

In terms of fashion on a sustainability level, we also need to entangle it into the natural environment, the social environment, and into our mental environment to help us see where these injustices lie, for example the double standards the West. We don't apply the same model across the world or to other populations. We have, for example, environmental regulations. Trying to limit extraction and pollution and so on in the environmental ecology here in the West. But then, we outsource the labour and the production overseas to countries where, then, there will be extraction, pollution, and other types of labour injustices and so on. And of course, the mass extinction of animals, etc.

But as long as it doesn't happen here, it's OK if it happens there. So that's a typical type of injustice in which fashion is very much entangled these days. But we also have the social dimensions of fashion, the second ecology. A similar thing happening where a dominant group in society sets the standard of judgement across the whole population.

We tend to be lead by group that is already in society, well-educated, with fancy high earning jobs set a beauty standard (which can incoporate the desired/accepted skin colour, and race) and market it through media and by using a language that is deemed eloquent. They set they latest fashion and explicitly disregard other populations and the struggles of the populations are having to catch up, in that sense. So that's another type of injustice where you have a double standard at work within the social ecology. 

Mental ecologies, meaning that if my self-esteem and my sense of self-worth and my desires are actually entangled into what other groups coming from richer backgrounds or from positions of privilege. If they set the standard for my sense of self-worth, well then, there's again an injustice happening. And of course, we have the same kind of setting within the fashion system where this also happens across all three ecologies.

The social, environmental, and mental ecologies of daily life.  interactions from childhood in settings all around, school, work, daily life, public and private life or even online. for example  how you are treated on the school playground. or excluded  from night  clubs with a dress policy, like a code word to keep poor people or people of colour out.

Clothing is used as an excuse to actually sort people and exclude people in much more everyday ways than perhaps what we usually think. And of course, we can take the example of bullying, too. Of how bullying, in many cases, clothing is actually the excuse that is used when the cool kids are rejecting the losers on the playground. That they are saying, oh, we don't like that colour or whatever - think Mean girls, "on Wednesdays we wear pink" don't come and sit with us, you're not the cool guy and they say something about clothing. Because we all know that we shouldn't judge people by the surface. But this is what happens.

fashion is also so deeply entangled in our mental lives, for example lying about clothes-- "I got it in the "sales", "I just threw it on"  "I don't really care about clothes"

To wear clothes means that we put ourselves out there for others to look at and to see. There is no unmediated way of appearing before others where I can just transfer my inner mind into yours and it's all fine. You will see me and judge me. And this is, unfortunately, the way that social interaction works. But this is, of course, in that realm that fashion operates and can be so successful, but also can be so deeply unjust.

So the question here becomes, why do you lie? Why is it so uncomfortable to sometimes actually acknowledge that, well, I actually wish I was looking a little bit more sophisticated or  interesting. through dressing we can exercise a sense of control, a sense of self-authorship.  We choose what we buy and wear, how we style and accessorise it, we choose when we wear it, the occasion. There's something extremely powerful in that. 

So the BIG question for sustainability, the issues around injustice is, how do we make this fantastic possibility of self-authorship available to as many people as possible? At the same time, so we don't sacrifice the planet and create conflicts and undermine people's self-esteem and make them addicted to this medium.

But can you use it as a tool to develop a self-knowledge and take oneself on a journey to become what one really wishes to be in the world?

FASHION: the fashion industry

 

the Fashion industry is a multibillion-dollar global enterprise devoted to the business of making and selling clothes.Some observers distinguish between the fashion industry (which makes “high fashion”) and the apparel industry (which makes ordinary clothes or “mass fashion”), but by the 1970s the boundaries between them had blurred. 

Fashion is best defined simply as the style or styles of clothing and accessories worn at any given time by groups of people. 

There may appear to be differences between the expensive designer fashions shown on the runways of Paris or New York and the mass-produced sportswear and street styles sold in malls and markets around the world. However, the fashion industry encompasses the design, manufacturing, distribution,marketing, retailing,advertising, and promotion of all types of apparel (men’s, women’s, and children’s) from the most rarefied and expensive haute couture (literally, “high sewing”) and designer fashions to ordinary everyday clothing—from couture ball gowns to Juicy Couture-brand sweatpants. it's not just about the style or type of clothing, but instead encompassing it all overall, as a collective. Sometimes the broader term “fashion industries” is used to refer to the myriad industries and services that employ millions of people internationally in all forms of skills.

https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/fashion-industry-guide-new

Fashion is a general term for a popular style or practice, especially in clothing, footwear, accessories, makeup, body piercing, or furniture. Fashion refers to a distinctive and often habitual trend in the style in which a person dresses or styles themselves to in a sense of behaviour. Fashion also refers to the newest creations of textile designers. The more technical original term costume has become so linked to the term "fashion" that the use of the former has been relegated to special senses like fancy dress or masquerade wear, rather than everyday wear. while "fashion" means clothing more generally, including the study of it. Although aspects of fashion can be feminine or masculine, some trends are androgynous and all fall under the term fashion and into the fashion industry. The fashion industry consists of four levels: the production of raw materials, principally fibres and textiles but also leather and fur; the production of fashion goods by designers, manufacturers, contractors, and others; retail sales; and various forms of advertising and promotion. Clothing industry or garment industry summarizes the types of trade and industry along the production and value chain of clothing and garments, starting with the textile industry, embellishment using embroidery, via the fashion industry to apparel retailers up to trade with second-hand clothes and textile recycling.

https://www.britannica.com/art/fashion-industry

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.