Fashion Semiotics: The Body, Dress, Identity, and Knowledge

This book offers a comprehensive review of concepts from general structuralist semiotics, and their application to the study of fashion systems and the objects they originate. It goes beyond the visual aspect of images and material culture, exploring the relations of narrative and meaning that crystallise the “mechanism of change” that governs fashion systems. Furthermore, the author argues that the system of dress, accessories, and self-presentation are not the only manifestations of a fashion system, interrogating the pertinence of the model developed throughout its sections to the study of knowledge. The book presents three case studies. The first focuses on the construction of body and dress as agents, and their dynamic interaction as the core of fashion changes. In the second case study, the foundations of cultural opposition between Western practices and the “Islamic Other” are challenged, utilising the semiotic analysis to test the semantic pertinence of this “false contrariety”. The book closes with the reassessment of the assumption that fashion occurs only in dress and, perhaps, other objects and forms of life belonging to consumable culture.

Through these case studies the book makes a statement about the value of cross-discipline and cross-paradigm explorations. As the three sections of this work present the results of a search for a “theory of everything”, this manuscript demonstrates the comprehensiveness and urgency of semiotic studies that cross areas and push the limits of the theory.