Translating Tigers: The Visual Rhetoric of Fashion Communication in Kenzo’s Logo

Abstract

In the 21st century, translation studies has expanded its boundaries and paradigms so that it is now possible to use its tools and methods to research the communication of fashion at textual as well as material levels, as inter-semiotic and cultural translation. Fashion communication, from the perspective of post translation studies, can be viewed as a process of cultural translation with visual symbols as its main text form, visual rhetoric as its core meaning system and a visual designer as its translator. At the intersection of translation, communication and fashion studies, the article takes Kenzo’s most successful “tiger icon” as the main research object, through the analysis of different forms of visual text structures throughout the whole process of fashion communication, to explore the semiotic transformation process and strategy of the “tiger icon” by means of visual rhetoric theories.

Keywords:

• Cultural translation
• post-translation
• visual rhetoric
• fashion communication
• Kenzo

Notes

1 Japanese designer Kenzo Takada served as the first creative director from 1970 to 1999. He was followed by French designer Gilles Rosier and Danish designer Roy Krejberg from 1999 to 2003. Italian designer Antonio Marras took over as third design director from 2003 to 2011. Then Chinese designer Humberto Leon and Korean designer Carol Lim followed from 2011 to 2019. Last, Portuguese designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista took over in 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This research is a phased achievement of the project Visual Communication Research on the revolutionary development of Communication Technology [19bxw096] sponsored by the National Social Science Fund and the project Countermeasures Research on Visualized Data News [16YJA860008] sponsored by the humanities and social sciences department of the Ministry of Education.

Notes on contributors

Zhuang Su

Zhuang Su holds a PhD in aesthetics. She is Associate professor and Deputy director at the Department of Communication in Donghua University, Shanghai, China. Her research interests are visual communication and fashion communication. She has published widely on these topics, including one academic monograph in Fudan University Press and more than 15 CSSCI academic papers. She is currently leading the research project entitled Visual Communication Research on the revolutionary development of Communication Technology, sponsored by the National Social Science Fund. [email protected]

Siyan Song

Siyan Song is a Graduate student in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research area is on media culture and public discourse.