The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
space dedicated to Cine-Moda, seven films from the 1990s were cited as
instrumental in revolutionizing the relation between fashion and cinema; a
revolution that heralded the return of the ‘style film’ (see Martin & Wilkes
1998) in which costume, objects and style have a central role and share,
sometimes even usurp, the limelight with plot and actors.
What remains of all this apart from the image on the screen? Garments
from famous films are venerated and exhibited as icons or auctioned at
astronomical prices: the grandiose caparisons of The Last Emperor, the red
velvet dress with a minute waist worn by Michele Pfeiffer in The Age of
Innocence, the magical twinkling shoe by Ferragamo in Andy Tennant’s A
Cinderella Story. Or else, a style remains, with which to construct a piece
of the history of the modern propensity to think through images. 7
In cinema the central importance of visual signs is indisputable, even
though they do not exhaust its complexity of languages, or better, the heterogeneity
of cinematic language that goes to make up a film (Aumont et
al. 1994). In the sign system of fashion, on the other hand, the status of
the visual remains to be investigated, and thus speaking of the relation
between visual semiotics and fashion becomes a sort of epistemological
challenge to the history of twentieth century semiotics, especially Barthes’
project of a ‘fashion system’ conceived essentially as the reduction of the
garment to the word, the primacy of linguistics over semiology and of the
verbal over the non-verbal. Nearly fifty years after the publication of
Barthes’ work, semiotics now fully recognizes that it is possible to go
beyond this project of ‘reading’ a garment only within the limits of
described fashion; and this lesson has been learnt from Barthes himself!
As Gianfranco Marrone writes, fashion was for Barthes ‘a type of discourse
in which clothing practices, aesthetic representations and specialized
utterances merged in a complex life form’ (Marrone 1998). Just as
fashion is not merely the word, nor is it merely the image, even though its
grip on the world comes about primarily through a visual dimension. This
dimension concerns the semiotics of the styles, forms and materials of
which fashion garments are made, as well as the function of fashion as a
mediator between taste and received meaning, a mediation which is realized
through the special relation fashion sets up between signs, sense perceptions
and social discourses.
Before continuing, however, I would like to clarify a few concepts.
Primarily that of the ‘clothed body’ as a semiotic category epitomizing the
ways in which, through its visual dimension, the subject establishes its
being in the world and its appearance style (see Calefato 1986, 1992,
1996). Dressing in this sense is a non-verbal language, a device for modelling
the world, a form of projection and simulation, valid for both the
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