were also illustrated and even discussed using discursive material from all kinds of press articles, selected according to their thematic relevance. I would like to point out that this material hardly constituted a closed corpus, subjected to systematic analysis and did not allow a representative account of the media’s position and media coverage from which the fashion industry’s re-presentational policies benefitted. On the one hand, its use was illustrative. On the other hand, it provided an overview of the place that certain advertisers occupy in the media space, including in national or regional daily press titles for which fashion is not a preferred subject. Finally, the consultation of press articles also made it possible to study, I would remind you, in an illustrative and not representative way, a possible “discursive smoothing of the forms of diversity and heterogeneity in general” (Oger and Ollivier-Yaniv 2006, author’s translation) likely to harm the image of advertisers in the sector studied.
This research was partly organized around a process of direct observation, implemented in the context of exhibitions offered by fashion brands or department stores and on the occasion of the opening of certain ateliers or group headquarters at special events. These exhibitions were visited as part of a research approach, with the aim of observing the discourses and scenographies offered throughout their visit. To put it another way, this attendance was not motivated, at least not solely, by a personal interest in fashion, but by the desire to seize the device deployed in order to enable retail advertisers to reconsider themselves and their products. From a methodological point of view, this practice of observation, which is both direct and participatory, was in line with the issues pointed out by Fontanille (2006, pp. 13–14), who notes that “the semiotic practice itself has largely exceeded textual limits, by taking an interest, for more than twenty years, in architecture, urban planning, object design, market strategies, cigar or wine tasting, and more generally in the construction of a semiotics of situations” (Fontanille, 2006, pp. 13–14, author’s translation). What I therefore call a corpus is more generally a set of heterogeneous materials, of varying levels of relevance, ranging from signs to texts, including formats, practices, situations and even strategies.
I.9. Staging of the work
In addition to its introduction and conclusion, this book is structured by three parts and six chapters, each part comprising two chapters. I have opted for a relatively atypical structure in the way in which the various stakes of this research are presented. In the first two parts, I present re-presentation policies of the actors and groups of the fashion industry before addressing the socioeconomic stakes of the sector and the models that structure it. This choice may indeed appear to be atypical because it does not allow us to get to the heart of the matter, which is the link between the economic models of the luxury fashion industry and the way in which this industry sets itself up in order to disguise some of the constituent elements of its models and in general of its industrialization. I chose this organization based on the following observation: as ordinary spectators of fashion brands, their communication strategies and their merchandise, we are first and foremost confronted with the sector’s re-presentational policies, long before we are interested in the industrial workings that organize it34. The fashion industry’s re-presentation policies are part of the visible, exposed and circulating face of the sector, which millions of spectators are confronted with on a daily basis35. It is this visible face, its rewritings and its circulations that I wanted to first expose in order to report and discuss the way in which the fields of art, culture, religion, the sacred and politics are invited into the visible activities of the fashion industry. Part 1 will address the processes of culturization and artification that characterize the sector’s re-presentation policies. I will look upstream at the so-called “traditional” communication and marketing strategies, such as media advertising, ready-to-wear collections and distribution strategies (Chapter 1), while downstream I will study the way the fashion industry occupies spaces that belong to art and culture while transforming its boutiques into places with artistic aims (Chapter 2). Part 2 will address belief and engagement as they result from intertextual, anaphoric and sometimes parodic processes in the religious, sacred (Chapter 3) and political (Chapter 4) realms. Part 3, on the one hand, will deal with the industrialization processes of luxury fashion, its managerial creativity and the resulting dysphoric stakes (Chapter 5); on the other hand, it will expose the mechanisms that contribute to the establishment of the symbolic and economic power of the fashion industry’s representational device through a new processing of certain elements of the corpus analyzed throughout parts 1 and 2 of this book (Chapter 6).
Notes
1 1 The flagship store is the largest and most prestigious of all the shops of the same commercial name.
2 2 Article published on January 16, 2006 in the “Blogs” page of the electronic edition of Le Monde, written by Lunettes Rouges: http://lunettesrouges.blog.lemonde.fr/2006/01/16/2006_01_bernard_arn_van/.
3 3 Article published on October 11, 2005 in Libération, headlined: “LVMH met l’art en tête de gondole”.
4 4 Not in the physical sense of the term but in the pragmatic sense, including a whole area of skills and specific actions. The art space is neither a museum nor an art center, but the virtual deployment of works and values related to the field of art.
5 5 The video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INQLTKtEAx4.
6 6 An excerpt of the parade is available at: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x26yehx.
7 7 These words were given to Karl Lagerfeld, artistic director of Chanel, and relayed by Le Figaro, on October 1, 2014, in an article entitled “Fan des ‘seventies’”.
8 8 “Lagerfeld et Chanel dans la rue”, Le Bien public, article published on October 1, 2014.
9 9 Yves Saint Laurent for any element resulting from the brand’s communication strategies and marketing policies until the end of 2011 and Saint Laurent Paris from 2012, when the brand’s artistic director for this period, Hedi Slimane, changed the name of the brand.
10 10 According to the online edition of the weekly business magazine Challenges, in 2014, Dior sold approximately 826,000 bottles of J’adore “with a turnover of 55 million euros, up 3% over last year”: https://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/classification-j-adore-de-dior-reste-numero-1-des-ventes-de-parfums-en-france_162670.
11 11 Which I present in Chapter 3 of this book.
12 12 This is also called textuality. This difference is analyzed throughout Chapter 1 of this book.
13 13 While luxury is traditionally described as a sector that escapes industrialization, the so-called market luxury fashion belongs to this segment whose goods
