Reading Fashion from the Threshold: Discursive Instability and the Geopolitics of Fashion’s Periphery

Abstract

This article examines fashion as a self-descriptive discursive system whose coherence depends on the spatial displacement of instability. Drawing on Roland Barthes, John Agnew and Yuri Lotman, it argues that fashion stabilises meaning at its symbolic centre while relegating ambiguity, excess and residue to peripheral zones. Sustainability and circularity are therefore analysed not only as corrective frameworks, but also as modes of self-description through which fashion absorbs critique while leaving structural asymmetries largely intact. Methodologically, the article adopts a critical-semiotic case study approach grounded in a broader research trajectory on the geopolitics of fashion, global fashion circuits and textile debris in Chile. It analyses Chile, and particularly the Atacama Desert, through academic literature, media reports, institutional materials and selected cultural interventions related to second-hand clothing and textile waste.
By introducing the concept of the semiotic threshold, the article identifies internal zones where translation intensifies and fashion’s discursive coherence becomes fragile. At these thresholds, second-hand garments oscillate between commodity and waste, visibility and marginality, value and residue. The analysis considers Atacama Fashion Week/Desierto Vestido, RFD Tarapacá and El Gigante Vestido as semiotic interventions that contest the symbolic death of discarded garments.