A Japanese Discourse of Fashion and Taste
Author: Moeran, Brian
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 8, Number 1, 1 March 2004 , pp. 35-62(28)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
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Abstract:
This essay examines the discourse of fashion and taste in Japanese fashion magazines and takes as its theoretical starting point Roland Barthes's “book of method”, The Fashion system. It focuses, however, on cultural signifieds, rather than signifiers, on the one hand, and argues, contra Barthes, that there is both a practical and aesthetic function in fashion's written language. Content analysis of Japanese fashion magazines in 2001 is used to assess the degree to which there is a fit between the theory and practice of fashion language usage. The data - based on the fashion industry's structuring of clothes into silhouette, item, fabric, detail, colour and accessory, supplemented by three further evaluative categories of taste, look and season - suggest a coherent linguistic system of fashion taste. The concluding analysis argues that the discourse of fashion is made up of key evaluative terms which are also found in other evaluative cultural fields such as aesthetics, art, music, sports and wine. Moreover, the multiple condensed meanings of these keywords allow members of the fashion world to mark out and contest semantic territory in which local cultural preferences engage with globalizing norms of taste.Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.2752/136270404778051898
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