Visual fashion and language

a semiotic-social analysis of women’s clothing in photographs from the 1920’s

Abstract

Fashion makes it possible to understand the sociocultural developments of a given society. It can be seen as a cultural manifestation and as a form of language, making it possible to be analyzed through semiotics. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the forms of representation used to build identity meanings from the observation of women’s clothing present in the photographs of the 1920s, through social semiotics, identifying and reflecting on the message visually transmitted by the clothes, establishing a relationship between the message transmitted by the image with the social construction of the female body and the historical and sociocultural context of the 1920s. Methodologically, the study presents a bibliographical research based on scholars in the areas of semiotics and fashion such as Natividade and Pimenta (2009) and Bonadio ( 2007) followed by the analysis of the images regarding their representational, interactional and compositional meanings, justified by the fact that visuality and fashion are areas of analysis still lacking in studies, but also by the relevance of the study of fashion and visual language for several areas of the know. The results suggest that clothing can transmit messages and information within a sociocultural context, a manifestation of a non-verbal communication system.