practices, because they are designed for a multiplicity of media and because they tend towards a general occupation of the fashion industry of the media space and sometimes even of the public space, these re-presentation policies form a generalized apparatus.
I.6. The power of the fashion industry’s re-presentational apparatus
The fashion industry’s re-presentation policies will thus be approached as constituting an apparatus that grants the industry in question a “power of institution, authorization and legitimization as a result of the thoughtful functioning of the apparatus on itself” (Marin 1981, p. 10, author’s translation). It is throughout part 3 of this research that I will attempt to account for the mechanisms through which the fashion industry’s re-presentational apparatus presents a power aim. Following Michel Foucault and the way he defined the heterogeneous dimension of the apparatus, the objective of this research will be to analyze the fashion industry’s re-presentational policies, their material and formal formats29. Thus, the apparatus is thought of as “a heterogeneous whole, comprising discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic proposals, in brief: of the said as well as of the unsaid” (Foucault 1994, p. 299, author’s translation), as well as “everything that has, in one way or another, the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, shape, control and ensure the gestures, conduct, opinions and discourses of living beings” (Agamben 2014, p. 31, author’s translation).
The fashion industry’s re-presentational apparatus is therefore a plural continuum of media, discourses and practices understood as a single instance, despite their spatiotemporal discontinuity. Indeed, it draws its power and its symbolic and pragmatic effectiveness from the coupling it offers between the continuous and the discontinuous.
If practices and discourses manifest themselves in a scattered way in a strategically thought-out space-time, they are also iterative; this allows for the interaction between the event-driven and discontinuous dimension of re-presentational policies and a programmed and repetitive event. Moreover, in spite of the heterogeneity of the apparatus’s constituent elements, they manage to form, in fine, a homogeneous continuum because they are determined by the same underlying strategies and their aim is the same issues of modeling, interception or control: those of the presence of the fashion industry as a non-exclusively commercial instance and therefore its re-presentation and requalification.
I.7. Fashion and communication
Before presenting the theoretical and methodological point of view developed throughout this book, it is necessary to justify the link between the object of fashion research and its place within the ICS.
In outlining The Fashion System (1990), Barthes attempted to establish the grammar that could structure this language and consider fashion as a discourse. An exhaustive project, it became obsolete in the year of its publication: “From the very first pages of The Fashion System, [Barthes] confessed [...] the vanity and failure of his project. It was aimed at fashion; it reached only discourse, small, frustrated texts running on the pages of magazines” (Badir 2014, author’s translation). Before Barthes, it was Greimas (2000) who attempted, in his thesis, to describe the vocabulary of fashion through a study of fashion journals from 1830, offering, like Barthes, a sort of lexical encyclopedia of the practice of clothing as staged by media actors.
In the 1970s, it was the turn of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsault to take an interest in the atypical object of fashion and to point out the mechanisms that enable it to establish systems of domination (Bourdieu and Delsault 1975, pp. 7–36). Few works introduce this broad object into the ICS. Jeanne-Perrier (2016) analyzed the way in which the Internet has transformed fashion from the point of view of its mediation practices as well as from the point of view of mediatization. Actes sémiotiques devoted a dossier to the semiotics of clothing in 2014 (Mathé 2014). Research on the creative industries and their socioeconomic models studies the way in which luxury in general submits to issues of symbolic industrialization (Bouquillion et al. 2013). Findings such as that of Lipovetsky and Roux (2013) are often mobilized in the ICS in order to highlight the new aspirations of fashion, which the two authors describe as hedonistic consumption, by emphasizing the changes in the sector and also its marketing strategies. Finally, works within the scope of fashion studies approach fashion, its practices, its mediations and media coverage from multidisciplinary points of view, the specificity of fashion studies being the entry into the subject by the object and not by the scientific framework (Mendes and Rees-Roberts 2015, pp. 53–69). This research is significant, but the object “fashion” as a clothing practice, a mediating body, media coverage, industry, etc., remains peripheral in the ICS. However, the sector is arousing a definite interest by the diversity of the communication processes involved and also by the constant evolution of its models, which is taken into consideration more during higher studies.
To take an interest in the object of “fashion” from a communicational point of view is to try to grasp the complexity of a creative industry as much from the point of view of the processes of production, manufacture and distribution of its goods as per its inscription in the public space. Finally, at a time when luxury fashion and in particular its representatives such as the heads of the dominant groups in the sector occupy a certain media position and are also seeking to occupy a political position,30 it seems to me necessary, even essential, to take an interest in this object and to focus on the way in which what we call fashion in general is a multiplicity of gestures, practices, strategies and tactics and constitutes an object whose communicational processes need to be questioned from the point of view of what Jeanneret (2014) calls media capitalism.
I.8. Theory, method, corpus and situations
This research falls within the disciplinary framework of the ICS. It is defined as a study of the rewriting and transformation of communication strategies and market mediation, the latter also being understood from an advertising perspective, i.e. “a relay between supply and demand, the advertiser and its addressees, products and consumers” (de Iulio 2016, p. 64, author’s translation) generating symbolic and economic stakes. Its grounding in the ICS also testifies to an interscientific approach and mobilizes as much research in the socioeconomics of the creative industries as in semiotics31 and discourse analysis. The aim of this analytical position is to bring together around the same object of study a socioeconomic approach to fashion and luxury as a creative industry and a semiotic and discursive analysis of the mediations of this industry, mediations which, let us recall, are understood here as re-presentational policies. These two approaches are considered from a complementary perspective. The semiotic and discursive analysis will illustrate the socioeconomic stakes that shape this industry. The socioeconomic analysis will shed light on the way in which the same models of luxury fashion engender, or even impose, certain re-presentational policies implemented by this industry. The objective is to situate the strategies and market mediations of the fashion industry in the gaps between the production of discourse here conceived as being “at the same time controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to conjure up its powers and dangers, to control the random event, to dodge the heavy, formidable materiality” (Foucault 1971, p.11, author’s translation) and “industrialized cultural and informational productions both from the point of view of their production and their consumption as well as the complex modalities of their circulation in societies” (Miège 2017, p. 9, author’s translation).
Finally, this complementarity is based on the principle of “taking into account, in communication phenomena, that they are at the same time sociodiscursive, socio-anthropological, etc., and that consequently only inter-scientific approaches can give a relevant account of them” (Miège 2004, p. 52, author’s translation).
I.8.1.
