spectacular operation, a self-presentation that constitutes an identity and a property by giving it a legitimate value” (Marin 1994, p. 343). If the act of representing makes it possible to double a presence with a semiotic and discursive amplitude, while giving it a symbolic dimension, the representation does not – necessarily – bear any resemblance to what is represented. For art theorist Nelson Goodman (1976, p. 5), “the plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, refer to it”, while according to Bougnoux (2006, p. 61, author’s translation), “it is necessary to theoretically oppose manifestation (order of real presence) to symbolic representation (figuration in absentia)”. Finally, from an interactionist perspective, representation is understood as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way of the other participants” (Goffman 1956, p. 8). Representation allows a relationship to be constructed in an interactionist and semiotic way from the moment it symbolizes what is figurative in absence.
While representation is constitutive of communication when it allows the latter to present and symbolize a practice, a situation, a good, a concept, etc., what I aim to question in this book concerns the metasemiotic dimension of representation as mobilized, in several cases, by the fashion industry. Certain communication strategies designed and developed by this industry and questioned throughout this book go beyond the presentation–representation couple and reach a semiotic and strategic level that is a matter of re-presentation.
By re-presentation, I mean a dialogical process that consists of representing the representation itself, its authority and its agents. Re-presentation is at the same time presentation, representation and discourse that is as much about presence as it is about representation, in this case that of the fashion industry in the media space. It is at the same time a reflexive process (it refers to itself and to the instances that deploy it), a referential process (it refers to something external to it) and metalanguage because it duplicates its discourse. Louis Marin explains:
The representation, in its reflective dimension, is presented to someone. The representative presentation is taken in the dialogical structure of a receiver and an addressee, whoever they may be, to whom the framework will provide one of the preferred states of “making known”, “making believe”, “making something felt”, the instructions and injunctions that the power of representation, and in representation, addresses to the spectator-reader. (Marin 1994, p. 348, author’s translation)
Re-presentation is a representative representation, which duplicates the representative presentation evoked by Marin and which does not so much establish states of having done something as evoked above (knowing, believing, feeling) as states in which this past action of doing is made transparent and transformed into current action doing17.
Because it carries a discourse on its own spectacular organization, re-presentation is “a system whose content plane is itself constituted by a system of signification; or it is a semiotic that deals with a semiotic” (Barthes 1985, p. 77). Because it is called “metalanguage”, re-presentation is thought of here as mythology; “it is part of both semiology as a formal science and ideology as a historical science: it studies ideas in form” (Barthes 2002, p. 826). The latter were thus born of a second semiological system. Re-presentation is a double mimesis: that of an absence and that of a presence. While representation is based on “a mimetic operation between presence and absence [allowing] the functioning and [authorizing] the function of the present in the place of the absent” (Marin 1994, p. 342, author’s translation), the second semiological system that actualizes the re-presentation splits the presence-absence couple. Representation is qualification: it grants the represented subject a quality because it presents it by symbolizing it. Re-presentation is requalification: it is based on the first semiotic level, which is qualification, while at the same time doubling it, and going beyond it. When Louis Vuitton solicited the artist Vanessa Beecroft, the brand presented itself in a non-exclusively commercial instance, as a re-presented and also requalified instance: it re-presented itself through a discourse that emanated from the field of art and contestation; it requalified itself through this same discourse, whereas from the outset, neither art nor contestation were constitutive elements of the industrial and managerial organization of the brand in question. And in its approach, Louis Vuitton, just like the advertisers discussed in this book, aroused beliefs while at the same time carrying out a communicational practice that I describe as counter-fashioning18.
Re-presentation policies, in this case of the fashion industry, encompass strategies and tactics that go beyond the realm of trade and have a much broader focus in terms of living together and living with. It is in this sense that re-presentation is based on a policy, as it takes the form that would be of interest to the polis, which sees itself endowed with a certain amount of power.
A re-presentation policy is a form of discourse – in the semiotic sense of the term – which shows that “at the heart of power lies the power to develop a discourse about things and thus to value them in such a way as to demand the highest possible price for them. And also, the power to inscribe this discourse and the profits it generates in the fabric of reality” (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017, p. 497, author’s translation).
I.4. Counterfeits and beliefs
First of all, let us specify that in the framework of re-presentation policies linked to the fashion industry, it is not a matter of questioning the authentic dimension of the marketed products19, to which I do not grant any artistic value from the start. Fashion industry products “appeal to creativity in the design phase [but] are also backed by the heritage they reproduce and even extend, being preserved for exchange and sale” (Miège 2017, p. 94, author’s translation), which is not the case for artistic creative activity20. While the couturier’s fashion gesture may result in creations whose esthetic qualities can in some cases be recognized, this same gesture is not detached from a production perspective and commercial offer that inevitably determines the creation, itself no longer being, as stated above, the result of a single person but of a team contributing to the creative management of the product and its brand. The artistic positioning that accompanies the fashion industry’s products must also be related to “the objective of designers who implement avant-garde strategies [and which] is not to attain the status of an artist but rather to acquire a form of symbolic capital that enhances the fashion designer’s status” (Crane 2012, p. 248, author’s translation). At the same time, with the luxury fashion market being particularly developed and even industrialized, its professionals “know or should know that the realities of the markets in which the brands or houses they represent are present have little to do with the rarity, inaccessibility, and sometimes even absolute perfection of the object” (Bertrand 2011, p. 319, author’s translation). Faced with this constraint that opposes luxury and the market, I will question the counterfeit posture of the players in the fashion industry in the design of their re-presentation policies.
“A forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work” (Goodman 1976, p. 122). Based on this premise, it is possible to consider counterfeiting as the process of falsely endowing an object with a certain authenticity. Authenticity also plays a key role in the discourse and strategies of those involved in the sector. Faced with what Abélès (2018a, p. 92) describes as a “logo fatigue”, the argument of authenticity becomes a communication necessity. However, it is based on illusionist discourse about the historical and symbolic depth that accompanies the goods and the communication strategies of commercial luxury. By questioning the counterfeit position of the fashion industry’s re-presentation policies, the aim is to account for the way in which discourses that are commonplace, such as art and culture, the sacred and religion as well as politics, present themselves as an excellent communicational pre-text and pretext granting the actors of this industry a self-referential legitimacy. It is also a question of accounting for the way in which, just as fashion is copied and counterfeited,
