Consumer Behavior, Retail Experience and Fashion€¦ · difference and the two axes • Meaning...

Lecture 4.11.2016Dr. Pekka Mattila

Consumer Behavior, Retail Experience and Fashion

Thematic structure

Fashion as a system

Fashion as a language

Fashion as movement

Fashion as a power

structure

Fashion as retailexperience

4.11.2016Pekka Mattila

3

Your expectations?

Fashion as a system

“The first purpose of Clothes … was not warmth or decency, but Ornament … for Decoration [the Savage] must have clothes. Nay, among wild people we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized Countries.”(Carlyle 1831)

The Civilisation of the Renaissance (Burckhardt 1955; Wilson 2011)

• Jacob Burckhardt, nineteenth-century historian of the Italian Renaissance, related the freedom of city life to the development of individualism, and fashion as an expression of the individual:

• “In proportion as distinctions of birth ceased to confer any special privileges, was the individual himself compelled to make the most of his personal qualities, and society to find its worth and charm in itself. The demeanor of individuals, and all the higher forms of social intercourse because ends pursued with a deliberate and artistic purpose. … Even serious men … looked on a handsome and becoming costume as an element in the perfection of the individual.”


7

“Even today garments may acquire talismanic properties, and both children and adults often become deeply and irrationally attached to a particular item. Billie Jean King, for example, wore a favourite, sixties-style mini-dress for her big tennis matches in the belief that it brought her luck; during the Second World War British Spitfire pilots used to attach their girlfriends’ bras to their cockpits for the same reason.”(Wilson 2011)

“Adornment … which gathers the personality’s … radiance as if in a focal point, allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being. And this is so, not although adornment is superfluous, but because it is … This very accentuation of personality, however, is achieved by means of an impersonal trait ... [for] style is always something general. It brings the contents of personal life and activity into a form shared by many and accessible to many.”(Georg Simmel ‘Adornment)

“If the body with its open orifices is itself dangerously ambiguous, then dress, which is an extension of the body yet not quite part of it, not only links that body to the social world, but also more clearly separates the two. Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self”(Wilson 2011)

Consumption and the rhetorics ofneed and want (Campbell 1998)

“Both academic and popular discussion of consumption tend to centre around two dominant discourses or rhetorics. These are those of need (satisfaction) and want (desire). These rhetorics relate to contrasting models of human action with associated ideologies. The need rhetoric has its origin in a Puritan-inspired utilitarian philosophy of comfort and satisfaction, while the want or desire rhetoric has its origin in a Romantic-inspired philosophy of pleasure-seeking. Although both ideologies and their associated rhetorics are institutionalized in contemporary society, it is the former that tends to have greater legitimacy.”


11

Explanations for the “Birth of Fashion”

• Herbert Blumer (1900-1987) develops the ideas of Werner Sombart into his theory of ‘collective selections’ and suggests that:

1. Fashion emerges from the desire to be in synchrony with time, not to be “old-fashioned” and therefore excluded

2. This might have started in the middle ages when the new culture (Dante, Boccaccio etc.) of the ‘modern’ highlighted the difference between the present (14th and 15th centuries) and the (Ancient classical) past


12

Blumer on Fashion

• Blumer asks fashion to be taken seriously by those studying society. This is because:

• Fashion includes more than clothing (or “adornment”)• And it is usually not perceived as fashion, but as

“superior practice,” or natural• “The fashions which we can now detect in the past

history of philosophy, medicine, science, technological use and industrial practice did not appear as fashions to those who shared them. The fashions merely appeared to them as up-to-date achievements!”


13

Blumer on Fashion

• Fashion is socially important• “For example, the styles in art, the themes and styles in

literature, the forms and themes in entertainment, the perspectives in philosophy, the practices in business, and the preoccupations in science may be affected profoundly by fashion. These are not peripheral matters … where fashion operates it assumes an imperative position”


14

Blumer on Fashion

• Fashion is a rational behavior• “While people may become excited over a fashion they

respond primarily to its character of propriety and social distinction … Fashion has respectability”


15

Blumer on Fashion

• “…Open to the recurrent presentation of models or proposals of new social forms”

• Where there is freedom to choose between competing models of fashion

• Where there is no truth or value that makes one of these competing models inherently better than the other

• Where prestige figures exist to promote on of the competing models

• Where there is openness to the idea of the “new,” whether it be from the influence outside events, other people, or changes in social interactions


16

Fashion as a language

Semiology or semiotics• Semiology, or semiotics, broadly defined, is a

“science” that studies the political life of signs within a particular time and place, or the system of possible and impossible meanings. It examines rhetorical strategies and the structure of language through which meanings are secured and reiterated

• Semioticians classify signs and sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted. This process of making and transmitting meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual noises or letters, the body movements, or even something as general as the clothes they wear


18

Semiology or semiotics

• The signifier is the idea or the concept that is attached to a particular thing, which is the signified(thus, the designation of something as “fashionable” is the signifier, and the thing itself is the signified –which has no intrinsic or essential meaning without the signifier)

• The sign is the combination of the signifier and the signified, and the sign system is the larger historical system that secures the meaning of the sign within a chain of signs, or in relation to other signs


19

Titian’s Danaë with Nursemaid or DanaëReceiving the Golden Rain, 1553–1554.


20


21


22

What is a sign?

• There is an arbitrary relation between a sign and its meaning

- Referent: what the signifier purports to represent- Signifier: representational aspect- Signified: concept or meaning

• If the relation between signifier and signified is only defined by convention, then meaning or signification is socially and historically constructed


23

What is a sign?

• “For instance, one sign might be “mom jeans.” The signified would be the object itself –the actual, material thing– and the signifier is the “next” order of meaning-making. The phrase “mom jeans” is a signifier inasmuch as it mediates our understanding of the object through a word or phrase (or an image). But the signifier also includes the operations of meanings through which “mom jeans” comes to function not just as a denotative name for high-waisted, pleated, “relaxed seat” denim pants, but also as a connotative sign referring to a whole host of ideas about mothers (whether or not a person wearing them is a mother, or whether or not a particular mother wears them, why would a mother be wearing them) and their location in the fashion system.”


24

Roland Barthes and The Fashion System• Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System (1967) is a

classic study of how the world of high fashion industry uses images and words to create an abstract world of fashionableness

• This world must always change (in order to continue to sell new fashions) and always stay the same (also in order to continue to sell new fashions)

• The signs and sign systems Barthes analyzes are the ideas and ideologies that are transmitted through clothing and fashion magazine editorials in particular


25

Roland Barthes and The Fashion System• Barthes noted that, within fashion magazines, there is

always image, accompanied by text: there is always image-clothing, accompanied by the written-garment

• In the case of real clothing, it must be known not by sight, for its visual image does not reveal all its intricacies. It must be known through the mechanical process of its production: the seams, the pleats, as they are manufactured. Image-clothing is manifest through iconic structures; written-garment is manifest in verbal structures


26

Roland Barthes and The Fashion System• Barthes selected the verbal structures because he

wished to examine the supercode which words impose on the real garment. Much more than the photographic image ever might, Barthes felt that "language conveys a choice and imposes it, it requires the perception of this dress to stop here (i.e., neither before nor beyond), it arrests the level of reading at its fabric, at its belt, at the accessory which adorns it. . . . The image freezes an endless number of possibilities, words determine a single certainty"


27

Roland Barthes and The Fashion System• “In the case of real clothing, it must be known not by

sight, for its visual image does not reveal all its intricacies. It must be known through the mechanical process of its production: the seams, the pleats, as they are manufactured. Image-clothing is manifest through iconic structures; written-garment is manifest in verbal structures”


28

Northface syndrome


29


30

Three positions in reading a myth

1. Producer of advertisement: focus on an empty signifier, let the concept fill the form of the myth without ambiguity; use a simple system of equation, where the signification becomes literal again: the Negro who salutes = French imperiality

2. Reader of advertisement: an inextricable whole made of meaning and form, amazed at its greatness, absorb its messages willingly

3. Critic: clearly distinguishes the meaning and the form, and consequently the distortion which the one imposes on the other, undo the signification of the myth, the saluting Negro becomes the alibi of French imperiality


31

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes


32

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• Paradigma - a class of objects or concepts• Syntagma - an element which follows another in a

particular sequence


33

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• All social practices are sign-systems and thus open

to cultural interpretation (or de-mystification) - The “langue” of clothes (selection & combination)


34

a. blouse, shirt, T-shirt ; Paradigma

Syntagmab. skirt, trousers, jeans

sentence:1. blouse + trousers+ high-heeled shoes ok for a concert2. blouse + skirt + sneakers not for a concert

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes


35

Relationships <-------- Syntagmatic -------->

|Paradigmatic

|

A dog fell in this chair

The cat sat on the mat

That man ate by a hat

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• Meaning arises from the differences

between signifiers; these differences are of two kinds: syntagmatic (concerning positioning) and paradigmatic (concerning substitution)

• Syntagmatic relations are possibilities of combination, paradigmatic relations are functional contrasts - they involve differentiation


36

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• Syntagmas and paradigmas provide a structural

context within which signs make sense; they are the structural forms through which signs are organized into codes

• In Barthes’ Fashion System paradigmatic elements are the items which cannot be worn at the same time on the same part of the body (such as hats, trousers, shoes). The syntagmatic dimension is the juxtaposition of different elements at the same time in a complete ensemble from hat to shoes


37

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• Paradigmatic items share a similar structure,

function, and/or other attribute with others in the set: they are related to one another on the basis of similarity

• A socially defined, shared classification system or code shapes our selections

• The selected signs are combined through rules (i.e., tee-shirts go with sandals, not high heels), sending a message through the ensemble - the syntagm (Spiggle 1998)


38

Paradigma and syntagma:difference and the two axes• Selection requires us to perceive similarity and

opposition among signs within the set (the paradigm), classifying them as items having the same function or structure, only one of which we need

• We can substitute, or select - conveying a different message

• We need to know the 'rules by which garments are acceptably combined... The combination... is, in short, a kind of sentence (Spiggle 1998)


39

Consumer Behavior, Retail Experience and Fashion€¦ · difference and the two axes • Meaning...

Documents

Transcript of Consumer Behavior, Retail Experience and Fashion€¦ · difference and the two axes • Meaning...