The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
According to Julia Kristeva (1969), Barthes also intuitively sensed an
aspect of fashion as ideologeme, as the function, that is, of linking the
translinguistic practices in a society by compressing or concentrating the
dominant mode of thought.
The concept of ideologeme, however, may now be assimilated in that of
‘sign system’ as the mediation between production modes and ideological
institutions. While the ideologeme refers specifically to the text and the
written word (even though, as Kristeva says, the text manipulates categories
unknown to language), ‘sign system’ is a broader category that
includes a non-verbal dimension.
I should like here to look at the fashion model as a sign system. The model,
who maintains with the paper woman a relation of similarity and distinction:
similarity in that she is the model, distinction in that Barthes’ ‘absolute body’
becomes a sign exchanged in the worldly imagery of fashion. The taboo mentioned
by Barthes – not signifying the body but the garment – is shattered:
the mannequin’s body no longer signifies merely the garment, but a whole
world. The models are the new divas, distant stars, like the great Hollywood
actresses of the Golden Age of cinema, who are yet known to everyone, and
constructed in fashion discourse as a public space of universal discourse.
What’s more, beyond the passage from paper model to ‘spoken’ or
named model, there is another kind of passage, not temporal but semiotic:
from the ideal automatic body (incarnated by the top model) to an
everyday model of street fashion, in the dual sense, both metaphoric and
literal, of street fashion. Metaphoric: the fashionable body as worldliness
and popular culture, as unique yet universal language. Literal: the female
body as constructed and in construction, product and process of representation
and self-representation.
Let’s begin with an image from the 1950s: Lisa Fonssangrives, immobile
and sophisticated in evening gown and gloves. Triumphant, around her
body the folds of a Balenciaga cloak, around her neck four strings of
pearls. In a class of her own, even when she’s lying on the lawn in jeans
reading Gertrude Stein. The cigarette between her fingers has perhaps too
much ash, but who knows when, for past, present and future cease to exist
in the eternal instant of her pose. Lisa Fonssangrives incarnates the prototype
of the Barthesian model par excellence. The garment as signified,
existing without the body. The body as seat of the inorganic.
Walter Benjamin writes: ‘Every fashion is in conflict with the organic.
Every fashion couples the living body with the inorganic world. In fashion
the rights of the corpse prevail over the rights of the living. Fetishism,
underlying the sex appeal of the inorganic, is fashion’s vital nerve’
(Benjamin 1982: 124).
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