Fashion iconography as image of temporality

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relation the fashion imagery has with time and temporality. Scholars mainly emphasize the semiotic of fashionable appearances or analyse the aesthetics of their visual representations. In an historical perspective the study of sartorial pictures could nevertheless not avoid the role the fashionable clothes plays as markers of temporality in our visual culture. The paper inquires the birth of a specific iconography of clothing from the Renaissance time. It will investigate the way this imagery tried to perform the temporality of present that is to say of fashion. But while the French printed industry of the 18th c. tried to represent the image of the present in the dynamic the fashion gave to the time, a specific iconography of dress appeared. Its aim was to improve the performance of ancient time by the historical painting that was beginning to be reformed. Their requirement of exactness for dressing the past contributed to give birth, in the 19th c., to very illustrated books where the figures of ancient fashion functioned as markers of the temporal distance that separates the reader from the past. Actually the movies are certainly the most common and shared experience of the visual marking of time by dress and fashion. As at the theatre or now in videogames, the costume worn by the actors embodies the temporality of the action they play. But this experience of time is performed by the hotchpotch of the aesthetics of fashions of the past and present.