I’m curious about foraging for information in clothing. I don’t know if anyone has put these two together before. Maybe it won’t be fruitful, but it seems interesting. Other animals exhibit what might be called information or information scent and this is a biological advantage. That’s my current thought so far.

My curiosity with clothing and information has taken me down some roads before with Roland Barthes and others [link to putting on sexiness]

Does clothing have a code? Empirical findings and theoretical implications in the study of clothing as a means of communication – ScienceDirect

This paper examines the long standing suggestion that clothing has language-like properties by investigating two hypotheses: (1) clothing as a means of communication relies on a ‘code’, and (2) the clothing code is not uniformly known in the community that uses it.

There’s a lot I pull out of these 2 H. Clothing as a code is exciting to me (and Roland Barthes). I’m curious how they’ll test #2. I know people who disagree with the choices of dress of others.

Its expressive quality has led some to suggest that clothing resembles language (see Barthes, 1967,

Bingo.

the comparison of clothing and language encourages us to entertain unsuspected similarities.

Indeed. Shall we forage?

The term ‘code’ is here defined as the knowledge that must be shared by the addressor and addressee of a clothing message in order for the former to create this message and the latter to understand it.

This has an information theory vibe to it. In this direction, complexity is coming around the bend.

A code specifies significant entities and the rules by which these entities are selected and combined in the construction of a message (Eco, 1976, p. 90; Jakobson, 1971d, p. 241).

This sounds really intersting. I know I’m not going to finish this thought in a pomodoro or even begin it properly.

because the same system exists in him. – (Benveniste, 1971, p. 21)

Could we get back to grammers and alphabets and production rules? I would be much more comfortable with that.

And before I get lost in definitions, let’s see where this paper is going.

First, it was supposed that evidence of any consistent pattern of agreement in the interpretation of clothing looks could be taken as evidence of a shared code.

I appreciated this because it has a tactile feel to it, contrast with Barthes tens of chapters and sections of key terms which never seemed applicable to me.


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