Dress in culture and culture as a sign system

Abstract

The culture of any society embodies its ideas, customs and social behaviour, often evinced through the arts and other intellectual manifestations. One aspect that is frequently overlooked is that of dress. One of the distinctive features of dress is that a group of people share a particular pattern or style of dress. The overall style of a dress is a consequence of the culture of that society, and the traditions of that people. The way people dress and adorn the body with a variety of jewelry and the method of arranging cover to the areas of the body is part of the culture. Individuals share the ideas and beliefs in their culture and participate in the social arrangements which guide their lives through the transmission of culture. The objective of the study is to explore the relationship in between dress and culture and to understand dressing a type of human symbolic activity, creation of signs and a way of giving meaning to everything around. The research reveals changes in contextual boundaries of culture will impact the systems of signs in order to understand the culture which predominate dress communication. The research employs depth observational studies of visuals collected from various sources such as mural paintings belongs to 15th Century, wood and stone carvings and visuals from travellers records. To validate data utilized many original sources of information including secondary sources of original records of travellers, research papers and books .Cross checking with sequence written data with similar visuals established reliability of data. The study is inductive and utilized qualitative method.