The System of Fashion: Historical and Semiotic Analysis and Gender Social Implications
In this paper, fashion in clothes is analyzed as a socio-semiotic phenomenon that can represent a tool of social transformations, including the creation and change of systems of gender social roles, as well as the formation of structures of social power. The historical and semiotic analysis of fashion is carried out: various historical types of fashion are considered and systematized. The basic semiotic mechanisms of fashion influence on public opinion and social groups are found out. The groups of signs generated by each type of fashion are analyzed. It is argued that before the modernity, fashion in clothes was a predominantly female project and used by women to create their own social statuses. Since the modernity, women lost the initiating semiotic force in fashion. It is shewn that fashion in clothes can be an effective tool for creating and reproducing gender cultural and behavioural stereotypes, and through them designers can affect the structure of gender social roles and statuses. The main dichotomy of fashion types is “natural fashion” and “artificial fashion”. Natural fashion corresponds to the semiotic structure of fashion created by women and to the symbolic leadership of the female, which had dominated culture for many thousands of years since the era of ancient matriarchy. It is demonstrated that the “natural fashion” for a long historical period was one of the tools for the creation of feminine and masculine gender social roles and their subsequent codification as social statuses. The hypothesis is put forward, according to which in modern times there is no liberation, emancipation and removal by the woman of any prohibitions in the field of clothing and image. Instead, there is a control of global codes of consumerism and mass consumption broadcast through mass media, over the symbolic power of the female in the creation of fashion as an artificial language with the capability of social transformations. The role of postmodern fashion as one of the factors of initiation of sexual revolution of the seventies is emphasized. An idea is advanced that the feature of modern (post-postmodern) fashion is pseudo-sociality, generation of simulacra of gender social processes and roles. The semiotic in the modern global fashion is characterized by the tendency to radicalized repetition. The phenomenon of global fashion in the modern world is studied. The globalization of fashion has led to the fact that the matrix code of universal global fashion becomes a generator of simulacra; it forms elusive signified and series of signifiers that do not lead anywhere.