The Corset and the Hijab: alternations of absence and presence in the 19th and 20th-century Fashion System
This paper looks at the trajectory within the history of dress, from the point of view of two objects – the Corset and the Hijab – reflecting on the meaning of the changes that caused those garments to be in and out of Fashion in different periods. The work will examine key moments of rupture with, and return to those manners of clothing the body, focusing on the early 19th century, the Victorian Era, and the 20th century in England and Egypt: a section of History marked by constant alternations between corseted and “freed” silhouettes in Europe; and between veiling and unveiling in the British and French Middle-eastern colonies. Through the standard semiotics of Greimas, Barthes’ Fashion System, and Landowski’s theory of the interaction regimes, the work equally aims at gauging the trajectory of French semiotics, from thematic role to the accident, questioning to what extent the changes in Fashion align to those developments of the semiotic theory. Presenting a manner of examining the relations between body and dress, as well as between clothed body and other clothed bodies, as intersubjective relations which exist at the core of social interactions, the theoretical scope of this work touch points of intersection between Semiotics and Phenomenology, a path suggested in Greima's last individual work, De L'imperfection. The proposed overlapping resorts the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty addressing the phenomenal space and intersubjectivity, chiefly when it comes to the analysis of the interchanges between the I and the Other, which equally motivates our parallel between Western and Oriental sartorial practices. The main corpus comprises historical images of the listed periods, as well as the work of specialists in each of the two forms of dress, especially the writings of Kunzle and Steele on the corset, and Ahmed, El Guindi, and Shirazi referring to Islamic dress. The research resorts to traditional semiotic methodology, such as the generative path, aiming at investigating the fundamental level of the alternation between absence of presence of the Corset and the Hijab in their respective cultural contexts in the mentioned periods, while exploring relevant socio-cultural contexts relating to those manners of clothing the female body, and the discourses they produce. This proposal finds justification in the importance of addressing the matter of othering in the 21st-century which is largely constructed through dress: by creating parallels between West and Orient, rather than opposing the two traditions, our effort aims at exposing approximations between traditions, interrogating if the same approximations exist between different theories likewise.
Country:
United Kingdom
Theme And Axes:
Semiotics and philosophy
Indexical semiotics (materialities, bodies, objects)
Institution:
University for the Creative Arts
Mail:
mariliabombomjardim@gmail.com
Estado del abstract
Estado del abstract:
Accepted