Barthes: fashion system

is the structural analysis of women’s clothing as currently described in fashion magazines; its method was originally inspired by the general science of signs postulated by Saussure under the name of semiology.

• Saussure:that the principles of semiology can be abstracted and used to analyze non-linguistic sign systems.

• Barthes wanted to analyze the relationship between images and text in the production of Fashion

• Barthes homes in on fashion as a system of interrelated conventions governed by precise laws. He’s interested in the way that these sign systems produce not clothing, but the abstract notion of Fashion

• world of high fashion industry uses images and words to create an abstract world of fashionableness that must at once always change (in order to continue to sell new fashions) and always stay the same (also in order to continue to sell new fashions).

• The signifier is the idea or the concept that is attached to a particular thing

• Which is the signified (saying something is “fashionable” is the signifier, and the thing itself is the signified – which has no intrinsic or essential meaning without the signifier).

• The sign is the combination of the signifier and the signified

• sign system is the larger historical system that secures the meaning of the sign within a chain of signs, or in relation to other signs.

http://politicsoffashionuiuc.wordpress.com/tag/the-fashion-system/

• Mum jeans

Example: mum jeans• The Sign:Mum Jeans. • The signified would be the object itself –the

actual, material thing, the JEANS• –The phrase “mum jeans” is a signifier as it

shows our understanding of the object through a word or phrase (or an image). But the signifier also includes other meanings through which “mum jeans” functions a a term

• not just as a denotative name for high-waisted, pleated, “relaxed seat” denim trousers,

• but also as a connotative sign referring to a whole host of ideas about mothers (whether or not a person wearing them is a mother, or whether or not a particular mother wears them, why would a mother be wearing them) and their location in the fashion system.

A ‘semiotic’ reading of fashion

Boyfriend jacketVintage Coat

Playsuit