The Analysis of the Rhetorical System

The rarity and the poverty of the rhetorical system at the level of the signifier are explained by a constant denotative pressure on the garment’s description. On the rhetorical level, a general signified corresponds to the writing of fashion, and this general signified is the ideology of fashion. A third model is present in the rhetoric of clothing which participates in neither fashion’s sublimity nor its frivolity, because it doubtless corresponds quite closely to a real condition of the production of fashion. The phenomenon of composition is then itself one of the principal forms of the rhetorical signifier, all the more active because in the fashion utterance the units involved derive from a code which is ideally external to language, which increases, so to speak, the connotative force of the simplest speech. By accepting the pressure of denotation on the vestimentary part of its system, fashion remembers that it must help to construct the garment, even in a utopian way.