Stuff and Nonsense: The Limits of the Linguistic Model of Clothing

Abstract

Ever since the late 1950s and early 1960s when Roland Barthes revolutionized our conceptions of dress most scholars have worked with an idea of dress as being a system of social communication, one that was structured like a language. Over time this conception of dress has attained such prominence that alternative ways of comprehending costume have been completely absent.However, the communication model of dress is not as watertight as it may at first appear. Combining a critique of Barthes’ formulation of dress as a language with the work of the French thinker Roger Caillois on the non-utilitarian dimensions of human life this article attempts to open up a fresh way of understanding dress.

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