FASHION SEMIOLOGY

Fashion and Luxury are forms of communication.

As Barthes sustained in 1967: “Clothing lends meaning to our body and, therefore, makes it exist: it emphasizes and reveals. Clothing neither hides nor shows, but alludes and emphasizes: clothing does not exhibit, but semanticizes”. [Barthes, 1967].

In other words, when we choose to wear a jacket or a pair of trousers, we do so not only to protect ourselves from the cold, but mostly as a form of communication.

Roland Barthes

“I ‘speak’ through my clothes. I speak when I strut into the office in the morning with a regular striped tie. I speak if I suddenly replace it with a jazzy tie. And I speak if I appear at a board meeting without a tie”. (Umberto Eco)

Système del la mode, one of the fundamental books to understand the fashion phenomenon

“Fashion Semiology: the language of Fashion and Luxury through style, communication and marketing” is a blog intended to help recognize, in an uncomplicated way, the sensory effects generated by the “language of fashion” and, inevitably, by the language of luxury, to act communicatively in order to achieve the desired results and become an expert in understanding and anticipating the communication dynamics of Fashion, endorsing the words of Edward Sapir: ”The chief difficulty of understanding a fashion is the lack of exact knowledge of the symbolisms attached to its forms, colours, textures, postures and other expressive elements of a given culture”.

It intends to cast a light on all the signs used in Fashion and Luxury, when they are used properly and achieve the desired results, and, most of all, when they are misused, creating entropy in communication, a misunderstanding of the message intended to be sent by the creator of Fashion, therefore of Luxury.

It intends to emphasize that, in the words of Noth: “goods (including clothes) are signs whose meaning is always determined by the sender (through advertising) and by how the receiver interprets signs.”

It intends to underscore the indissoluble bond between Fashion, Luxury and the signs they produce, and marketing, whose purpose is to “sell” these signs to the receiver.

In order to do so, it utilizes the analysis grid of Fashion Semiology, a modern discipline that falls under Semiomarketing, the branch of marketing originating in the application of semiotic survey to market research, a methodology based on the polysemantic analysis, decomposition and recomposition of verbal, visual and morphological texts (advertising, internal communication, Web) created by marketing and communication departments, analyzing consumer profiles and expectations.

Its aim is to optimize the communication-sales process.