300 years of bodies and corsets in their rhythmic manifestations: for a fashion semiotics

The article reflects on a research project analysing 300 years of the practice of constraining the feminine torso, aiming at presenting the theories supporting the investigation to expose how their intersection and articulation could become a method for analysing fashion objects. Stemming from the semiotics works concerned with the plastic of objects, mainly the theories proposed by Greimas and further developed by Floch and Oliveira, we present an address of Fashion beyond its visual dimension, exploring the manners in which the relations between the body and its dress are problems of discourse and narrative interactions, returning to Greimas’ Standard Semiotics and Landowski’s Socio-semiotics. The combination of theories presented in this piece was used to examine a corpus of feminine apparatuses utilised to reshape a woman’s silhouette throughout history, from the 18th century to the present, such as corsets and crinolines, as well as various other types of shapewear, in combination with the analysis of supporting texts, such as Artworks, literary works, pieces of popular culture and advertisement. The work presents the steps of the investigation taking place between 2012 and 2014 – the selection of the corpus and its analysis – and the future developments stemming from that first exam, bringing about a reconstruction of the work and its results as a methodologic proposition that can serve the analysis of sartorial objects but isequally pertinent to the analysis of any other manifestation that is subjected to rhythmic changes.