The Clothed Body

Degree Zero of Fashion
and the Body: The Model,
the Nude and the Doll
At the beginning of the new millennium fashion speaks a global language:
the sometimes real, but more often imaginary utilization and enjoyment of
its signs transcends continental, social and ethnic barriers, since these signs
follow the laws of the object and image market, which we consider universal.
The specific qualities of fashion items (colour, design, material, etc.)
are of secondary importance compared to the simple fact of their being on
the market and, more especially, compared to the fact that, in this
exchange of images, it is the body that is in circulation. Specifically models’
bodies – the new divas, the new stars. Until the 1960s (when the oldest of
today’s top models were probably not even born) the ‘mannequins’ were,
as Roland Barthes (1967: 259) writes, the ‘pure forms’ whose role was to
signify not the body but the garment (see Calefato 1996: 88–100). Their
role, though star-like for some (for instance, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and
Patti Hansen), was linked to a clearly defined sector of the market and of
communication, which was the world of fashion up to that time. Barthes
attributed to the cover-girls, or mannequins, the role of representing a synthesis
of dress and costume, that is, both an individual phenomenon and
a socially regulated value system. Barthes writes that in a garment from a
designer collection there are traces of dress linked, for example, to the size
and shape of the model wearing it, but these are of slight importance since
‘the ultimate aim of the garment is, in this case, that of representing a
costume’ (Barthes 1998: 68).
Today the taboo highlighted by Barthes – not signifying the body but the
garment – has been violated and the models, products and emblems of
fashion as a triumphant and luxurious sector of mass communication, have
undoubtedly taken the place once occupied in social imagery by actresses.
Like the great Hollywood divas, these mannequins are, for the public,
distant, unreachable stars, and yet they are known to us down to the
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