Volume 23, Number 19 · November 25, 1976
The Dress Code
By Alison Lurie
On Human Finery
by Quentin Bell
Schocken, second edition, revised and enlarged, 239 pp., $14.95
Dress and Society, 1560-1970
by Geoffrey Squire
Viking/Studio, 176 pp., $16.95
Hollywood Costume—Glamour! Glitter! Romance!
by Dale McConathy, with Diana Vreeland
Abrams, 317 pp., $35.00
The statement that clothing is a language, though occasionally made with the air of a man finding a flying saucer in his Queens backyard, is not new. Balzac, in Une Fille d'Eve (1839), observed that for a woman dress is 'une manifestation constante de la pensée intime, un langage, un symbole.' More recently Roland Barthes, in 'The Diseases of Costume,'[1] speaks of theatrical dress as a kind of writing, of which the basic element is the sign. As far as I can discover, however, neither the structuralists nor other, earlier theorists have gone on to remark that the language of dress, like other languages, has a vocabulary and a grammar. In different places different 'languages' are spoken, some (like Dutch and German) closely related and others (like Basque) almost unique; and within every language there are many different dialects, some almost unintelligible to members of the mainstream culture. In the language of dress, too, each individual speaker employs subtly personal variations of tone and construction.
Review, 3747 words
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