Fashion in the 19th century literature and periodical press: lexicological reflections

Abstract

Fashion uses its own language to transmit the identity of an individual or a group in a certain society and time; therefore, it can be seen as a form of communication, a mediation between somebody and the world that surrounds them. In the 19th century, the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution and the sociopolitical situation made possible the democratization of fashion, which began to be produced on an industrial scale, leading to a visual approximation between the clothes from different social classes, which made their clothing light and simple. In this paper, we propose the study of the 19th-century fashion lexicon in Brazil, by means of a theoretical review of the two main areas of our research object, Lexicology and Fashion, and by means of the survey of lexical items referring to garments in literary books such as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis (1994), and Lucíola, by José de Alencar (1988), and also some publications from A Estação magazine: illustrated newspaper for the family (1879-1904). We intend to collect lexical words that name fashion items to create a corpus with the words we find in the publications previously mentioned; furthermore, we will create a record that will feature the collected noun with the reference and the context in which it appears in the publication, as well as lexical and semantic information necessary for its clarification.