By Eric Shorey
Alison Lurie’s 1981 book The Language of Clothes is perhaps the best text ever written on fashion and semiotics. Lurie’s book makes a structuralist argument for understanding fashion as its own kind of speech or communication — with its own kind of grammar. Lurie doesn’t need to resort to Lacanian or Lévi-Straussian linguistic or philosophical jargon to assert her thesis:
“Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street or in a meeting, or at a party, you announce your sex, age, and class to me through what you are wearing — and very possibly give me important information (or misinformation) as to your occupation, origin, personality, opinions, tastes, sexual desires, and current mood. I may not be able to put what I observe into words, but I register the information unconsciously; and you simultaneously do the same for me. By the time we meet and converse we have already spoken to each other in an older and more universal tongue.”
Lurie’s point about “sex” aside (it was ‘81, queer theory was only just becoming a thing, let’s give her a break here), her statement remains valid to this day. Fashion functions as what she calls, borrowing from the field of psycho-linguistics, a “sign system” — at times more basic and at other times more nuanced than vocalized utterances.
The Language of Clothes lays out a very basic history and hermeneutics of how to “read” an outfit, observing the ways in which certain styles, trends, fabrics, and functions will be adhered to or played with in order to express different emotions or communicate something about the wearer. Lurie notes that like all other languages, the language of clothes is an ever-changing system: in her revised edition of the book she sees how the uprising of youth subcultures that exploded in the decade after the text’s pub date was significantly changing the meanings of certain items and garments. Tattoos, for example, changed from a signifier of criminality to an indicator of “a certain insouciance and spirit of adventure.” Just like the capriciousness of slang, “words” in this system take on new meanings over time.
What Lurie likely couldn’t have foreseen in 1981 would be the eventual total collapse of streetwear, ready to wear, high fashion, and haute couture: that these days fashion, like all languages, has become schizophrenic as a result of post-modern media bombardment. In 2022, peoples’ outfits are often closer to word salad than to actual coherent speech — and while some avant-garde designers (Hood by Air’s Shayne Oliver comes to mind) are better at expressing that schizophrenia more artistically, it’s certainly made deciphering meaning out of someone’s outfit a much trickier task.
For example: designer garments, overly wasteful or unnecessarily embellished items, and certain kinds of business wear were at one point used as indicators of wealth, what Lurie calls a form of “conspicuous consumption” — created expressly to communicate abundance or refinement. But with high fashion and streetwear slowly merging — haute couturiers are now producing priceless hoodies indistinguishable from $20 Champion sweaters — decoding what is conspicuous (and to who) requires knowledge of brand names or labels and their idiosyncratic aesthetic indicators.
In other words: it’s harder and harder to tell what costs a lot just from looking at it.
What’s designer, what’s not designer but is supposed to look designer, and what’s designed by a designer to look as absolutely quotidian (or even straight up destroyed) as possible — as either a post-ironic anti-fashion statement or to elude class resentment?
Destroyed Givenchy hoodie, resells for approx. $800
One now needs to study fashion much more carefully in order to be able to “read” an outfit. (Of course, “reading” — the queer art form of cleverly insulting an interlocutor — often employs caustic and insightful sartorial derision.) No one is better at “reading” than people who studiously devour the pages of Vogue, or slavishly devote themselves to the obtaining of branded items: who I refer to affectionately in the headline as label whores.
An anecdote: the other day I was at a friend’s house party, a pretty jovial gathering of 20 and 30-something queers ranging in subcultures from goths in festival or rave gear to yuppies in blue button downs. While out for a smoke, three gender non-conforming punks asked to bum a cig from a friend: their buzzed heads and tattooed faces at first (to the unsophisticated “reader”) indicated some kind of marginalization or (perhaps feigned?) hardship. But one of the kids’ shoes told a different story: they were wearing a perfectly fresh pair of Balenciaga runner sneakers — not fakes either, I can tell! — currently priced at $1150.
Balenciaga runners, retails for $1150
Note: these Balenciagas certainly have some interesting design flourishes (they kind of look like 3 different sneakers torn apart and re-sewn together), but are honestly not that far from a $156 pair of Asics runners — at least to the untrained eye.
Was this punk telling on themself? Were their tattoos and shorn hair what Lurie meant when she said “misinformation”? Were they “pretending” to be “poor” for some kind of reverse social clout or subcultural status? Or were we, me and this punk, in that moment, speaking to each other in a secret language? Telling each other something about ourselves in a voice that no one else around us (those who are not label whores) could hear?
Of course, one never knows how another person obtained certain items: young, broke artists are often gifted designer clothes for influencer campaigns; others chase down sample sales where garments can be bought at 95% discounts. But fashion is often aspirational, and people can lie about themselves and to themselves — just like in speech. We often say things about ourselves we wish were true.
And people do tell on themselves all the time, in ways they might not be aware of — sartorial Freudian slips! I remain especially amused by (usually cis/het male) members of the professional managerial class who insist on wearing utility gear designed for manual laborers, like Carhartt or Dickies — as if to indicate a kind of lower/middle-class grit, gumption, and toughness they don’t actually possess. As if we couldn’t tell from their perfectly manicured beards, un-calloused hands, and uber-expensive gym bags that they are likely a graphic designer at Facebook, or whatever. What does someone who wears faux-paint-stained designer jeans really think they are saying about themselves?
In the 21st century, label whores can communicate certain kinds of secret braggadocios through outfits that appear entirely conventional and unremarkable to the average onlooker. The exorbitantly wealthy (and extremely clever bargain hunters) are singing sophisticated stories about themselves in silent songs.
They are telling us what they want to hide and what they want to show.
In fact, the language of label whores has become so refined that it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with a certain symbolic system of personality based on what brands someone is wearing: no more or less arbitrary than astrology or Myers-Briggs.
Alexander McQueen: values beauty, refined, artistic, self-destructive
Versace: ostentatious, flamboyant, humorous, sex-obsessed
Louis Vuitton: classy, old money, stable
Chanel: averse to political discourse, erudite
Balenciaga: in-the-know, winking, ironic, clout-chasing
Armani: tacky, tasteless, try-hard, nouveau riche
Dior: simple, demure, conservative
Coach: bashful, stoic
Valentino: arrogant, haughty, stubborn
Prada: conventional, conservative, demure
Givenchy: knowledgeable, brave but unassuming
Hermès: subtly subversive, kinky but secretive
And so on…
Of course there’s a lower end hermeneutics at play as well: the choice of Nike versus Adidas, Vans versus HUF, Dolls Kill versus Blackcraft — all have weights and associations in specific sub-cultural contexts. One can always pretend to be totally removed from this system — off the fashion grid, so to speak — but as Jacques Derrida reminds us, there is no outside the text.
Despite their anti-capitalist leanings, subcultures develop their own micro-versions of these sign systems — the equivalent of local dialects. A goth who wears custom latex is often very different from a goth who wears Rick Owens. A punk who wears Fred Perry is a often very different from a punk who wears DIY studded vests — both of whom are very different from the “punks” who wear Hot Topic. Members of subcultures instinctively know how to read outfits within their own in-groups — as signs of fealty to certain ideological tenets of that subculture — but somehow they can’t imagine this kind of wordless communication is happening at all times elsewhere, too.
This is part of why — as dedicated readers of this newsletter are surely aware — I’m so obsessed with Telfar. Although the brand’s increasingly ubiquitous shopping bags are relatively minimalist, they act as a sort of signal to other label whores, a way for members of a secret community to invisibly high five each other in recognition of each others’ coolness and insider knowledge. If you don’t know what the T in a circle stands for, the purses look like nothing at all. But if you do, you’re part of a club. The gleeful cultishness of buying a Telfar — celebrated almost manically on their TV Channel, which often features videos of ecstatic customers gleefully unboxing or proudly wearing their new bags — is the joy of being accepted into a kind of clandestine society, at a relatively low price! (It doesn’t hurt that the bags are durable and functional as well.)
“So what we did was launch a TV Channel with no content,” the online station’s text reads in an ever-repeating gif. “We are making it up as we go. And when I say ‘we’ … you know who I mean.”
As someone who embarrassingly only speaks English, I sometimes wonder about the secret pleasures of overhearing conversations in other languages, the subversive joys of being able to talk shit in another language, right in front of someone else’s face. Fashion is another way of doing that, and one can “overhear” a lot of “conversations” happening if you know how to listen in the right way.
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