Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper, I intend to present a case in which the history of fashion
and the history of linguistic-semiotic studies interconnected in a
significant way: the field of fashion was identified by two of the founding
fathers of present-day semiotics—Algirdas Julien Greimas and Roland
Barthes—as a subject deserving close study and at the crossroads of
diachrony and synchrony; history and the system. Two important works
testify to this: La mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire
vestimentaire d’après les journaux de l’époque by Greimas (2000) and the
much better known Système de la mode by Barthes (1990).