Fashion as Cultural Translation: Signs, Images, Narratives (Anthem Studies in Fashion, Dress and Visual Cultures) by Patrizia Calefato

Author:Patrizia Calefato [Calefato, Patrizia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2021-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

In our epoch, objects, places and bodies are writing surfaces – they are covered in texts, names and brands. These signs have developed an increasingly important role in the modes of production of our times. The function of writing is no longer that of marking objects with ‘distinctive’ features, namely, to detach them from and oppose them to other objects, for example, like a sign indicating the name of a road or a label indicating the contents of a jar. Writing has developed a much more ambitious task: to embody a vision, a project, a tale. As the figure of writing, ‘in name appears the essential law of language’ (Benjamin 1996, 65).

The nineteenth-century Jewish mysticism scholar Gershom Scholem (1996) dedicated a central part of his research to the role of the name of God in Kabbalistic culture. This is an essential role if we accept the mystical hypothesis that the Torah, the sacred text of the Jewish tradition, might be – as Scholem explains – the expression of the infinite might of God, concentrated in his name. The power that monotheistic mysticism gives to the holy name can be a model for ‘mundane’ and secularised interpretations. The condition, of course, is that one should be able to find in the world something that can exist in the place of the name of God, namely, something with a similar ability to continuously create meaning from the incisive energy of a single sign. As the name of God in the text of the Torah, it should be a sign that can function as the central idea within the intricate fabric of a culture. I suggest the hypothesis that today, this sign might be represented by a brand.

To explain this hypothesis and apply it to how fashion brands are used, I am going to refer again to Scholem’s research. Doing so helps to sketch the existence in the contemporary world of a figure whose semiotic power is explained as a relationship based on the connection between text and body, understood both as the human body and a social body. Scholem was the first scholar to consider the different handwritten versions of the Book of Splendor (1963) dating back to the mystic circles which predate thirteenth-century Kabbalah. In this treatise, he exposes the technique of wearing a divine name: God’s secret names are written on a piece of parchment, which is then used to fabricate a jacket with no sleeves and a hat. The mystic wears these clothes and fasts for seven days, avoiding contact with any form of impurity. After this time, he must reach a water surface and ‘shout the name’. If a green figure can be perceived above the water, then the penitent is still impure and must start the ritual of the seven days again, until the figure on the water is perceived as red.

The idea to wear a name with an extraordinary power might not seem absurd today, in the plethoric universe of names that surround us on clothes and accessories in the form of brands, griffs, logos and labels.

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