HYPO ANS HYPER-CODIFIED DRESSES: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FASHION AND DRESS CODES

Dress follows a code that requires its language to be spoken in a “grammatically correct” way, on pain of banishment from the community.

If I live in the Western world and work in a bank, I cannot go out wearing a vest and a pair of shorts, because my dress is unfit for the standards of a workplace whose intention is to communicate to its employees and clients a sense of responsibility, soberness, professionalism and reliability. The “grammar” of dress in this case requires the use of a suit or sober clothes.

If, instead, I work as an entertainer in a tourist resort, the casual clothing mentioned above would perfectly conform to the workplace; it would communicate joy, imagination, light-heartedness and play, worlds apart from the dull routine of town work, providing clients with a strong connotation of disconnect with their normal lives (which is what they need and is the reason why they choose to spend money).

The question that follows is: are shorts and a vest grammatically correct or less for a worker according to the dress code?

Before giving a certain meaning to dress, we must consider the context, the identity of the wearer, the circumstance and the place. If, in fact, the worker is employed in a bank, and the bank chooses for marketing reasons to offer its clients on holiday a cheerful, relaxed environment that can adapt to the joyful climate of certain tourist destinations, then the choice of “lighter and more festive” dress could be appropriate.

Here’s an example of hyper-codified code. In a city bank, employees cannot wear clothing that is inappropriate for the workplace unless, under special circumstances, the bank chooses to change its policy.

This applies to dress code. What happens in the fashion world?

Things are somewhat more complicated, because fashion is different from mere clothing.

The word “clothing” refers to a series of objects worn by the human being mainly to protect himself against the weather, to conceal his nakedness and then to send a series of messages to his kind.

Fashion is the enhancement of this concept, since it is basically culture, meaning the set of usages and customs, values, beliefs and ideals of a given society. Fashion - real fashion - is the visible, tangible and stylized expression of culture.

We must, therefore, distinguish between:

• dress code
  (a more stable concept, indicating what is worn and considered appropriate in a given society)
• fashion codes
  (a multiple and dynamic concept, indicating a stylistic expression that varies in the space and time of the culture of a given society).