Clothing semiotics and the social construction of power relations

摘要

Henry David Thoreau once said: “It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes”. Indeed, clothes do much more than meet our physical and physiological needs. Clothes convey meanings in society beyond the superficial, enacting and even creating power relations between people. Considering the indispensability of clothes in our lives and the empowering, or disempowering, effects of clothes, this paper seeks to provide a framework with which clothing semiotics may be meaningfully explored and discussed.