Abstract

In everyday life, the way people dress is thought to furnish the attentive observer with information about them. In ethnomethodological terms, we would say that clothing is a source of “social information,” allowing subjects to form an idea of the “social and personal identity” of other people. For the sake of convenience, albeit simplifying somewhat, we may distinguish three aspects of this phenomenon: the dress observed, the interpretative process, and the results of the interpretation. This article is concerned with the process of interpretation itself. What I am trying to aim at is this: how to represent this process in a metalanguage, by means of a kind of artificial mechanism capable of simulating it adequately. And I shall be arguing that semiotics can provide a worthwhile conceptual framework for such a metalanguage.