Semiotics and Fashion Studies : limits and possibilities of a systemic approach to contemporary fashion

in English The view of fashion as a system of signification, first introduced in the important work of Roland Barthes The Fashion System (1967), has been dominant since the development of Fashion Studies. But in the last two decades it has been increasingly criticized and confronted with the concepts of identity as flexible dimensions. From a semiotic perspective, the materiality of clothes almost "disappears" into representation. Emerging research on fashion, on the contrary, draws on Gilles Deleuze's notions, that ideas are inseparable from their material expression, and tries to follow attempts in fashion to break with representational mode. But, if Deleuze argues that the possibilities to escape the representation belongs to modern art, with its metamorphoses, what can we argue about fashion? The thesis underlines that above all, fashion is commerce, and each brand carefully constructs its system of values. The physical experience of wearing clothes is always influenced by the meanings circulating in the system of fashion. The limitations of applied semiotics of fashion are evident (clothing and its representations always exist in the context of further semiotic systems), but ultimately unlike the heterogeneity of everyday practice, the "methodological purity" of discursive practices permits..