Dal vestema al word design: modelli di lettura e d’analisi linguistico-testuale a confronto

The names of every garment and accessory contribute to give shape to the mental representation of our personal and collective identi-ties: how can we comprehend and “read” this code? The processes of mea-ning in fashion discourse are connected to each other and must be analyzed together in order to understand their true relevance into the cultural and creative relationships. It is known that Barthes has shown that the fashion system is structured on different levels. The vesteme is a fundamental con-cept of his theory about the fashion system. It is the result of the intersec-tion of eight different axes (materials, size, colours, etc.) and four kinds of signifier/signified combinations (Barthes 1967). The theory of the Word Design (Rak-Catricalà 2013; Catricalà-Guidi 2014) starts from this idea to overcome the structuralist and socio-semiotic point of view and to examine the language of fashion through a cognitive paradigm. The key idea is that the verbal profiling (Langacker 2002) of the garments constructs and, at the same time, changes our perceptions and their valence like vehicle of com-munication. The paper is divided into two parts. The first describes the de-scription of the traditional models (sociological, anthropological and psy-chological too) of classification of the fashion terms, between the needs of similarity (clothing) and dissimilarity (fashion). The second presents some examples of garments names analysis based on the Word Design Theory (WDT), i.e. a new interface between the texts and the lexicon and the rhe-toric figures. The instruction-words/actions, the description-words/analogy and the narration-words/metaphors outline various semantic and pragma-tic contexts and are linked to different types of environment and affordance.