De Luto et Tempore: What's the Matter with Dirty Talk?

This essay provides quite some substance for musing apropos the materiality of fashion. That is to say, the tactile, olfactory, sometimes auditory substantiation, or the physical alterability, chemical corruptibility, and perceptual porosity and pollutability of the stuff fashion is made of. In this piece we look at fashion as matter, not form. At cloth, not clothing. At the signs of fashion intended as the processual, transitive, transitory arrangement of fabrics, not the ontological, intransitive, constative status of fully accomplished texts. Indeed, as Roland Barthes gracefully noted concerning verbal language, ‘text means tissue’. And yet, while text is traditionally read as a univocal ‘product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, [a meaning]’, the processual text-as-tissue notion seems to call for a more iridescent, a more amphibious critical look. We suggest following along Barthes’s generative idea that the text-as-tissue can simultaneously be made (i.e. ‘worked out in a perpetual interweaving’) and unmade, that is to say deconstructed and destroyed, in a degenerative (disgraced, distressed, dismembered, distasteful) fashion. So much so that the idea of text – and this texturing of it – as something that both builds and destroys itself, ‘like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web’, seems to encompass the ad-hoc hermeneutical field of ‘hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web)’. To cast an amphibious look – both literal and historical, i.e. à la lettre and through the lens of cultural history – at fashion as matter, and at the signs of fashion as the secreted threads of a hyphological oeuvre, is indeed what we aim to do in these pages.