This book offers a comprehensive review of concepts from general Structuralist Semiotics, and their application to the study of fashion systems and the objects they originate. It goes beyond the visual aspect of images and material culture, exploring the relations of narrative and meaning that crystallize the "mechanism of change" that governs fashion systems. Furthermore, the author argues that the system of dress, accessories, and self-presentation are not the only manifestations of a fashion system, interrogating the pertinence of the model developed throughout its sections to the study of knowledge. The book presents three case studies. The first focuses on the construction of body and dress as agents, and their dynamic interaction as the core of fashion changes. In the second case study, the foundations of cultural opposition between Western practices and the "Islamic Other" are challenged, utilizing the semiotic analysis to test the semantic pertinence of this "false contrariety". The book closes with the reassessment of the assumption that fashion occurs only in dress and, perhaps, other objects and forms of life belonging to consumable culture.
Through these case studies the book makes a statement about the value of cross-discipline and cross-paradigm explorations. As the three sections of this work present the results of a search for a "theory of everything", this manuscript demonstrates the comprehensiveness and urgency of semiotic studies that cross areas and push the limits of the theory.
Marilia Jardim is a Semiotician, Researcher, and Educator based in London, UK. A graduate of Communication of the Arts of the Body at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (2006), she is a former stage artist and costume designer. MPhil in Communication and Semiotics at the same institution (2014), she completed her qualification at the Socio-semiotics Research Centre (Centro de Pesquisas Sociossemióticas - CPS), directed by Eric Landowski and Ana Claudia de Oliveira. After six years lecturing on Communication, Culture and Identity for Art and Design subjects at the University of the Arts, London (UK) and the University for the Creative Arts (Epsom, UK), she completed a PhD in Communications and Media at the University of Westminster (2021). A former practitioner of both fashion and the body, her undergraduate art studies were polymathic, including the study of anthropology, philosophy, social sciences, religious studies, anatomy and modalities of bodywork that bridge dance and healing, such as Gerda Alexander's eutony, alongside the traditional learning of art history and theory. Her semiotic works are interdisciplinary, searching the dialogue with art and fashion history, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, as well as intersections between the French, Russian, and North-American semiotic paradigms. Since 2012, she has collaborated with collective projects at the Socio-semiotics Research Centre (Brazil) and was a guest researcher/speaker at the University of Turin (Italy), having published dozens of journal articles in influential fashion, communication, and semiotics journals. Her work focused on the interactions between body and dress as the engine of a fashion system, the complex identity dynamics and "false oppositions" constructed between Western fashion and Islamic techniques of femininity, and the wider grasp of a "fashion system" over cultural behaviours that extrapolate the sartorial--including the environmental crisis and the crisis of knowledge and truth. As an educator, she supervised more than 200 undergraduate dissertations in fashion studies and related subjects. At present, she is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Arts, London, where she teaches the interdisciplinary module AcrossRCA.
