Re-presentation Policies of the Fashion Industry - Eleni Mouratidou

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art market, which is also highly spectacular. By “fostering closer ties between famous artists and branded objects treated as unique pieces of artisanal origin (for example, Hermès bags or Vuitton luggage)” (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017, p. 33, author’s translation), the luxury fashion industry is doubling its spectacular staging.

      Entertainment shapes this industry, its goods, its actors and its discourse. Thus, this spectacular capacity aims to depict the fashion industry not so much as a creative industry with a commercial vocation, but, on the one hand, as a leisure industry, the spectacle being conceived here as a process of entertainment for the general public, and, on the other hand, as a media industry of “general interest” (Tremblay 2007, p. 216) and occupying in particular the public sphere, its “economic-social formation, its schedule” (Debord 1987, p. 13, author’s translation).

      I.2.2. A collective spectacle of reflexivity

      The spectacular potential of the fashion industry16 lies particularly in its “managerial creativity” (Barrère and Santagata 2005), a process of establishing “a new relationship between creation, production and distribution [and] leading to a new creation and management complex” (Barrère and Santagata 2005, p. 96, author’s translation), of which many actors are part. If, as Frédéric Godart reminds us, “the work of the fashion designer exists only because there is an economic and industrial activity that is deployed to enable the production of clothing” (Godart 2016, p. 76, author’s translation), this same activity can also promote the latter through communication strategies. Fashion is a spectacle not only because what it produces – its goods – can be spectacular, it is spectacular because of the way in which its goods are promoted based in particular on a spectacular process of collective reflexivity (Mouratidou 2012, pp. 11–21): whether they are haute couture workers, ready-to-wear design studios, make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, models, photographers, directors, fashion journalists, art directors, group presidents, decorators, architects, muses, trainees, assistants of assistants, etc., they are all part of the collective reflexivity process, the fashion industry stages and spectacularizes many trade bodies that could represent it. However, what I will focus on throughout this book is not so much the fashion industry’s representation processes as its re-presentation policies.

      “Representing means presenting oneself as representing something” (Marin 1994, p. 343, author’s translation). Representation is both presentation, that is “the very act of presenting that constructs the identity of what is represented, that identifies it as such” (Marin 1994, p. 342), and spectacularization, that is, “a spectacular operation, a self-presentation that constitutes an identity and a property by giving it a legitimate value” (Marin 1994, p. 343). If the act of representing makes it possible to double a presence with a semiotic and discursive amplitude, while giving it a symbolic dimension, the representation does not – necessarily – bear any resemblance to what is represented. For art theorist Nelson Goodman (1976, p. 5), “the plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, refer to it”, while according to Bougnoux (2006, p. 61, author’s translation), “it is necessary to theoretically oppose manifestation (order of real presence) to symbolic representation (figuration in absentia)”. Finally, from an interactionist perspective, representation is understood as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way of the other participants” (Goffman 1956, p. 8). Representation allows a relationship to be constructed in an interactionist and semiotic way from the moment it symbolizes what is figurative in absence.

      While representation is constitutive of communication when it allows the latter to present and symbolize a practice, a situation, a good, a concept, etc., what I aim to question in this book concerns the metasemiotic dimension of representation as mobilized, in several cases, by the fashion industry. Certain communication strategies designed and developed by this industry and questioned throughout this book go beyond the presentation–representation couple and reach a semiotic and strategic level that is a matter of re-presentation.

      The representation, in its reflective dimension, is presented to someone. The representative presentation is taken in the dialogical structure of a receiver and an addressee, whoever they may be, to whom the framework will provide one of the preferred states of “making known”, “making believe”, “making something felt”, the instructions and injunctions that the power of representation, and in representation, addresses to the spectator-reader. (Marin 1994, p. 348, author’s translation)

      Re-presentation is a representative representation, which duplicates the representative presentation evoked by Marin and which does not so much establish states of having done something as evoked above (knowing, believing, feeling) as states in which this past action of doing is made transparent and transformed into current action doing17.

      Because it carries a discourse on its own spectacular organization, re-presentation is “a system whose content plane is itself constituted by a system of signification; or it is a semiotic that deals with a semiotic” (Barthes 1985, p. 77). Because it is called “metalanguage”, re-presentation is thought of here as mythology; “it is part of both semiology as a formal science and ideology as a historical science: it studies ideas in form” (Barthes 2002, p. 826). The latter were thus born of a second semiological system. Re-presentation is a double mimesis: that of an absence and that of a presence. While representation is based on “a mimetic operation between presence and absence [allowing] the functioning and [authorizing] the function of the present in the place of the absent” (Marin 1994, p. 342, author’s translation), the second semiological system that actualizes the re-presentation splits the presence-absence couple. Representation is qualification: it grants the represented subject a quality because it presents it by symbolizing it. Re-presentation is requalification: it is based on the first semiotic level, which is qualification, while at the same time doubling it, and going beyond it. When Louis Vuitton solicited the artist Vanessa Beecroft, the brand presented itself in a non-exclusively commercial instance, as a re-presented and also requalified instance: it re-presented itself through a discourse that emanated from the field of art and contestation; it requalified itself through this same discourse, whereas from the outset, neither art nor contestation were constitutive elements of the industrial and managerial organization of the brand in question. And in its approach, Louis Vuitton, just like the advertisers discussed in this book, aroused beliefs while at the same time carrying out a communicational practice that I describe as counter-fashioning18.

      A re-presentation policy is a form of discourse – in the semiotic sense of the term – which shows that “at the heart of power lies the power to develop a discourse about things and thus to value them in such a way as to demand the highest possible price for them. And also, the power to inscribe this discourse and the profits it generates in the fabric of reality” (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017, p. 497, author’s translation).

      First of all, let us

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