La freccia e il cerchio
anno 7, numero 7, 2016
pp. 154-156

Alessandro Saggioro
The veil and the reality.
The ambiguous heaviness of clothing

What should really interest the researcher, historian or sociologist, is not the passage from protection to ornamentation (an illusory shift), but the tendency of every bodily covering to insert itself into an organized, formal and normative system that is recognized by society (R. Barthes, History and Sociology of Clothing, in The Language of Fashion, p. 6).

Fashion is the profane heir of the theology of clothing, the mercantile secularization of the prelapsarian Edenic condition. (G. Agamben, Nudities, p. 80)

   1. The human species has always looked for a practical solution to the difficulties and unpleasantness of being in the world; this is a fact so obvious as complex and stratified. The development of a network of cultural tools as feeding, housing, clothing, lasted millennia and still does. Structurally, these tools have evolved into existential modes impacting, in a continuous and sustained way, on the living conditions, eventually becoming part of them and constituting, as it were, their “natural” integration, we usually call “culture”. At present, everything has economic consequences thus to make solid the bond, no longer apparent, between our daily life and the solutions adopted by the human species and processed in an increasingly refined and sophisticated way by the modern consumer society. The homo technologicus does not resist the temptation to look for new ways and gadgets to improve, at least apparently, his living or economic conditions. This in part may be true, but the paradigm of structural transformation of our lives determined by the advent of increasingly invasive technology and industry even though perceived as pleasantly decisive cannot be analyzed in its entire scale and scope here.
   Therefore, today we delude ourselves to have at hand the solution to all our problems, but the beginning of the process that led to this phase is so dated as the dawn of time. A reflection on the fact that human beings get dressed, and that they do so in a complicated way cannot be ignored in this general scenario. At present, technology invades the fashion system with preponderance: fashion creations go through the scanning of the body, measurements are processed in an automatic way, identifying the defects that the tape of the tailor once had to discover and reshape in the dress with skillful hand, 3D printers seem increasingly an indispensable tool to think in an innovative and adapted way to move with the times, more and more sophisticated materials promise relaxation and comfort like never before. The new tools and methods of communication sublimate the ephemeral, traditionally considered as a sort of disengagement from the fashion system, wrongly judged as superfluous and downgraded to the edges of the cultural, social and economic system. Yet the first dresses from nature do not seem so far away, for the function and effectiveness, from what we wear today. But, isn’t it true that the primary function of any outfit is to cover and, as appropriate, to keep warm or cool the body? The technical efficacy and pleasantness of a dress structure is more and more elaborated and can be measured, no doubt, by steps; but the initial paradigm to keep warm, to keep cool always remains the same. To the essential function is added a symbolic network which, on the one hand, makes it much more difficult the discourse, and on the other hand, can be represented as a set of values that has a lowest common denominator. Once developed a dress with a clear function, it gains a value that goes well beyond a material significance. The dress is, so, perceived also as an object with social value, primarily symbolic.
   As well as every action is trivially technique but can have different meanings, the simplicity can be also complex. Once accepted that a dress might have not only a tangible function, but also a symbolic significance, the scale from zero to infinity is no longer measurable and scannable. It is impossible, therefore, to go through the endless possibilities that the human species has been given to clothing. The very concept of “clothing” is wide, wider than “wearing a dress”: the human being wears a culture, made up of acts, of choices, and of verbal and not-verbal communication models; he wears culture in a very differentiated way according to regions, times, local identity. The cultural habitus has contaminations, overlaps and differences, again, at a space-time level. Nowhere and in no time the cultural construction is “simple”, precisely identifiable in well-defined coordinates, reducible to elementary signs.
   And if the dress is structurally an object that covers parts of the body, but in part leaves it exposed ambivalence between presence and absence, concealment and nudity it may also take a number of modes, ranging from the coverage through paintings and signs, to the scarification, to the chemical and plastic transformation, to the management of the living body, as well as of the dead one, of the body already born, as well as of the body yet to be born. The signs are so numerous and varied because mankind is granted the idea of infinite option: at individual level, as well as for social choices and for more or less transverse and global identifications.
   Besides, the possibilities of interpretation and reading, in which physical and social sciences really should interact more and in a genuinely interdisciplinary way, are equally complex. The sciences of clothing still remain diverse and varied, prone to a lack of official defiling and, therefore, victims of a marginalization that does not correspond to the absolute importance of their subject.
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