SOFIA (Semantic Open Framework Interpretative Analysis)
Thinking that philosophy isn’t part of the daily dynamics in which we all live is an error that we have never done. Sofia is born from this awareness, a method which detects a space where philosophy of language and linguistic analysis encounter, focusing on fashion and on the types of communication that the brands use with their audience. The assumption this method starts from is that fashion is a language that is able to communicate based on a set of signs. Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between Language, which is a social establishment, a code the individual uses to interact with their own community of membership, and Word which constitutes the vocal act which causes the tongue to be declined in an original way by those who use it, allowing it to have a creative approach to communication. Applying this approach to the fashion world means to analyse it at the signifier level, the function of the sign and the meaning, bringing about a method that every stylist and brand mean to use as a language. Identifying a series of semantic traits that cover the range of meanings that distinguish the fashion-language and by grouping them in the seven semantic families of appearance, creativity, passion, recognisability, sophistication, style and transgression, we disassembled the images that stylists offer down to their constituent elements, an operation which was subsequently integrated with a procedure that lead to the possibility of measuring the language of every designer on an evaluative scale. After having analysed the communicative phenomenon of fashion in its parts, it was analysed as a whole, arriving to a numerical summary of the meaning of the communication that is being tested, which makes these arithmetic results translatable into a real philosophical reading.