The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
to this ‘mythical’ dimension present in the various social discourses
through which fashion is expressed and circulated.
In his essays on contemporary mythologies, fifteen years after the publication
of Mythologies, Barthes (1984: 67–8) clearly grasps the multidimensional
and pluri-discursive nature of contemporary myth. Barthes
tended to avoid the new catechism of post-1968 demystification, and this
choice led him to construct new figures of discourse, new spaces for reflection
on myth and communication. The figure of the ‘idiolect’, in particular,
constituted a kind of ambivalent zone both for the reproduction of myth
and resistance to it. The trans-textual system of signs and discourses that
defines fashion today expresses itself through ‘idiolects’, that is, spaces
within which the social subject anchors its identity to images and objects
that circulate the body in society, while giving an impression of the uniqueness,
exclusiveness and originality of every sign exhibited, every garment
worn. Thus a close connection is established between the way in which the
subject imagines and communicates his/her styles (life style, dress sense,
way of thinking) and the perception of his/her social identity in all its multiple
and negotiable forms.
So it becomes interesting to look at those aspects of the system which
best represent unusual values and unexpected excesses. Not so much in
terms of an ideological ‘symbolic resistance’ to myth and consumption, but
rather in the search for an unstable tension between the logic of social
reproduction and its aesthetic and sensorial reception and elaboration by
social subjects.
Clothing is sometimes a way of dreaming an imaginary inhabitable
world. From a linguistic point of view, this is expressed in the way in which
the garment is metonymic with regard to the body: ‘red shirt’, for example,
indicates both the garment and a member of Garibaldi’s fleet and represents
an exemplary mixture of clothing and utopia. An historical utopia,
however much the two terms (history and utopia) may be at odds: the ‘red
shirt’ belongs to a reality that actually happened, like its sister the ‘white
shirt’ of Robespierre and Lenin, but also of Zapata and Goya’s riflemen.
Utopias of varying import, certainly, yet all utopias enough to make the
‘white shirt’ a positively evocative sign (unlike its opposite the ‘black
shirt’). The influence of this item on the imagery of dress is evident in contemporary
men’s fashion, where it is used by designers like Dolce &
Gabbana, who are inspired by the traditional costume of Southern Italian
men, those who were ‘liberated’ by the ‘red shirts’.
There has always been a close relation between clothing and utopia for
the simple reason that every utopia – whether in literature, philosophy or
cinema – is populated by clothed human beings. A single ‘emblem’, an
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