When we speak of fashion we often compare it to a language.
Fashion seems to have vocabulary, with “terms” or “words” that appeal to at least two of our senses: vision and touch. Fashion’s visual terms can be a rare pair of Louboutins, an even rarer stage costume from the Folies Bergère or a common white t-shirt. Then these visual terms can be characterized by our sense of touch as the clothing, bags, shoes move from mere glossy picture in a magazine to reality, ready to be worn, adorned, displayed. A characterization like the feel of soft fur inside of an Ugg boot or the crisp almost sticky feel of a vinyl rain slicker. Perhaps fashion also has olfactory terms like the familiar scent of Man by Comme des Garçons.
Fashion seems to have “syntax,” where the order in which certain items are displayed and represented is relevant. Order can be important with respect to time: your miniskirt worn after eight PM versus the same miniskirt worn to the office connote largely different ideas and illicit vastly different responses and glances from the other members of the clothes-wearing society surrounding you. The same idea of syntax and order can be thought of with respect to layering:
You can wear a black trench coat over a pink shirt and perhaps say “I’m tough but I’m still a girl at heart” or you can wear a pink trench coat over a black shirt and perhaps say “I’m loudly and comfortably a girl’s girl but on the inside I’m a little harder, a little darker.”
If fashion has a vocabulary and syntax it most certainly has grammar. Perhaps a neglected button or a wily shoelace is like a missing comma or misspelled word.
But is fashion as clean-cut as a language? We’ve never had a Webster’s Dictionary come out to give finally, a once-and-for-all definition of what a black trench coat means or what the crossed C’s of a Chanel necklace should “say” about the wearer.
If fashion isn’t so close to a language, is it closer to music?
Fashion seems to resist unambiguous meanings and instead seems to fall closer to music’s ideas of moods and emotions. Our black trench coat seems to evoke ideas of secrecy, mystery, gloom, strength. The scent of Man by Comme des Garçons reminds one of closed library doors, dark woods, scotch-whiskey and maybe the hint of fine cigar tobacco. We cannot say that the scent represents the essence of manliness, because it doesn’t: there are many types of men. What we can say is that it evokes the idea of certain kinds of men and the same scent will evoke a different response from every individual ranging from repulsion to intoxication.
What makes fashion “Fashion” is that it is more than a visual-tactile-olfactory code or language, but that this “code” is constantly in flux, constantly changing and almost always ambiguous. Our black trench coat can remind us of the horrors of Columbine one year and remind us of the blockbuster hit The Matrix the next, moving from ideas of violence against innocents and guns to saving oneself and new, heightened consciousness.
What if the other codes around us were fluctuating as well? What if street signs were ambiguous and open to new interpretations? Stop is the new Go, Red Lights are the new Green Lights. What a mess! As with any new idea there would be those ahead of the curve and those behind the curve and thus many car wrecks and bike collisions.
Now in order to fully understand we must look at how and why Fashion’s visual- olfactory-tactile code is ambiguous and why and how in Western Society it has been in constant flux for much of the last thousand years. Thus we have a reason for Part II.
Cheers!
Sources: Davis’ Fashion, Culture and Identity, 1992
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