Multisemiotic Discourse on Fashion and Clothing in Contemporary China

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter explores meanings in contemporary Chinese fashion from the standpoint of social semiotics. The purpose is to present the preliminary findings about fashion communication in contemporary China and to propose a meaningful approach regarding how practitioners manipulate semiotic resources, deliver information and interact with audience in terms of product design. To elucidate the phenomena, the study adopts interdisciplinary means by incorporating a range of knowledge across sociology, psychology, anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics and other subjects. The theoretical principles originate from social semiotic theories, that is, systemic functional linguistics and multimodality. This chapter selects nine emerging designers and their works from Hong Kong and mainland China as subjects to investigate. Under the guidance of grounded theory methodology, the chapter contextualizes the systemic frameworks of fashion and clothing and generates a grounded theory that can display the resources deployed by designers for making meaning in response to the developing market. The evidence validates that clothing serves as a form of fashion, in which we use a multiplicity of semiotic resources for synergistic communication during design processes. In addition, analysis of the data reveals a close relationship between meaning and its accompanying social context. Such results accordingly demonstrate the semiotic nature of fashion and clothing and initiative an analytical method to construe fashion and clothing in a practice environment. Through this way, the chapter contributes to the literature in light of theory, practice and methodology, which thus gives future research insights and has significance for fashion studies, social semiotics and many other domains.KeywordsMultisemiotic discourseFashion and clothingContemporary China