The Clothed Body

Dress and Social Identity
In 1937 the Russian semiotician Pëtr Bogatyrëv, using a functionalist
scheme, analysed the folk costume of Monrovia, in which he identified a
series of functions: practical, aesthetic, magical and ritual. According to
Bogatyrëv, even the smallest detail allows us to recognize the function to
which a garment corresponds. For example, white for mourning dress
alludes to a ritual function; red stripes on young girls’ skirts, to a social
function; red for young children’s clothes is used to ward off evil spells and
reflects a magical function. Every colour is related to the age and thus the
social status of the individual in the community. This functionalist analysis
foregrounds the symbolic significance of clothes: a garment is a sign, and
wearing it fulfils specific functions that can coexist, or overlap, in the same
item. When the dominant function is particularly strong, it neutralizes the
others: for instance, the aesthetic overrides the practical function when the
body is subjected to deformations or lacerations.
Bogatyrëv stresses a sort of closure in the way in which each function
establishes the social significance of a garment, and he defines folk costume
in general as a signifying system. Nevertheless, his analysis allows for an
excess, so to speak: residual meanings expressed, above all, in the status of
that most particular of functions, the aesthetic function. Just as what
Jakobson (1963) calls the ‘phatic function’ in spoken language is there
simply to maintain a minimum level of communication or contact between
speakers (humanly more important than, for example, defining social
status), the aesthetic function in the non-verbal language of folk costume
indicates that signs are merely ‘there’ in clothes. Thus an ‘unmotivated’
relation is set up between body and garment, a ‘something more’ that
exceeds functional equivalence. Even the signs that indicate functions other
than the aesthetic (the colour or width of the stripes on the young girls’
skirts, for example) and sanction the social importance of costume were
originally based on aesthetic details: fabric, colour, shape, size, position
(vertical, horizontal) and so on.
Bogatyrëv found a close analogy between folk costume and mother
tongue, both of which he defines as systems having ‘the function of a structure
of functions’ (1937: 140). We give emotional prominence to our
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