Open AccessA ‘semio’ approach to fashion discourse: critical perspectives on the luxury industry
Author(s) -
François Provenzano
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
punctum.international journal of semiotics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2459-2943
DOI - 10.18680/hss.2020.0031
Subject(s) - semiotics , exhibition , sociology , variety (cybernetics) , presentation (obstetrics) , critical theory , creativity , capital (architecture) , aesthetics , politics , cultural studies , epistemology , art , art history , visual arts , philosophy , law , anthropology , political science , computer science , medicine , artificial intelligence , radiology
This book offers rich and clear critical perspectives on the luxury fashion industry and its market mediations. It relies on a multi-layered methodology and deals with a wide variety of materials: texts, images, but also objects, experiences, exhibitions, buildings, interiors. By doing so, Mouratidou demonstrates the unity (in other words: the standard format) of the politics of re-presentation in the luxury fashion industry and the unity of the semio approach she defends. Grounded on the semiotic analysis of discourses (from Greimas to Dondero and Fontanille), this approach includes the numerous insights of the most recent works in Communication studies. The book also offers a fruitful overview of the French tradition of critical works on cultural industries and mediations (from Barthes to Jeanneret); it also sheds light – most appropriately – on this tradition’s Critical Theory background (Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, Debord). In addition, we must also highlight Mouratidou’s terminological creativity. In her case studies, she proposes a range of stimulating theoretical terms, such as re-presentation, semiotic capital, culturalisation, fictivation, event-formula, and others adopted from theatre studies.