Gramática da consultoria de imagem: abordagem sociossemiótica

Abstract

This study analyzes the modus operandi of the image consulting and its narrative prescriptions for the client-recipient conducted by the consultant-sender from a grammar perspective under construction. As a corpus, image consulting unfolds in two parts. The first one, being systematic, concerns the historical mapping of a given subject that may carry out possible corrections of different aesthetic and ethical or behavioral modalities, and the second, of a procedural nature, considers the identity change of the judgement, which the image consultant and client determine as the best to act or to be in a public and private physical environment or even in a virtual place. The research problem stems from the idea that image consulting processes wrap a prescriptive model to place the individual in the same form of styles commonly known by fashion. To solve this problem, some hypotheses were raised, such as that ethics could be built with the image founded upon the change of reactions and behaviors and the subject’s positive practices throughout their life, guiding the identity construction of their image. Based on these hypotheses, image consulting works if the subject’s ethical and aesthetic qualities are in tune through humanistic instruction together with the overall visual constitution of the body. Although the specificity of the image consulting is highlighted in the subject image and in the behavioral customs, there is still, concerning the object, a formula of how to treat or even start an image consulting process. The foundation and method for this research were based on the semiotics of Greimas (1987; 1995; 2008), the visual semiotics of Floch (2001; 1995), the social semiotic developments of Landowski (1995; 1997; 2005; 2017) and Oliveira’s conceptualizations (1995; 2004; 2014; 2018) about the dressed body and its meaning in the social sphere and the researcher’s role as an image, style consultant. As a result, even though image consulting practices follow rules and prescriptions imposed by the fashion consumer market and its trends, this study proposes a methodological solution that is not founded on the invariable substance of building the recipient's appearance, but on the variable way of building that image, by resignifying the narrative paths of the image from the co-creation of imagetic panels of the recipient-client together with the sender-consultant