Les adieux de Valentino : la terminologie française de la mode et ses degrés de variation

[Autom. eng. transl.] The famous Italian designer bade farewell to the world of fashion in January 2008, on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of his house. To celebrate the retirement of the great fashion designer, a series of events took place in Italy as well as in France, the two countries that have contributed the most to his extraordinary career: for example, the festivities that took place 'Ara Pacis in Rome in July 2007 and who traced the history of his creations with a retrospective of some 200 models or the presentation of his ultimate collection for spring-summer 2008 organized in Paris, with two fashion shows: one dedicated ready-to-wear, the other at the Rodin Museum, haute couture. These celebrations have obviously attracted the attention of the whole world and have been much in the news and in the French media. In this contribution, we will examine the terminological description of these events, and therefore of Valentino's fashion, in a variety of texts: specialized journals, news magazines, newspapers and online videos will be the subject of this analysis. Our goal will first be to identify the most frequent terms and main designations of this lexicon, while highlighting the role of terminology in the representation of a media moment whose scope is both cultural and social. Among others, the use of the terms "red" and "red Valentino", as well as the remarkable use of adjectives in noun phrases, will be observed. Just think of the description that the magazine Elle (France) gave about the last parade in Paris: we talked about "long dresses draped, ruffled and tight very Valentino". We also propose to highlight the lexical variation of the thematic domain, from the comparison between several typologies of documents. Although it is possible to identify common lexical elements, there are indeed significant variations, related to the different degrees of technical words involved in the speech. For example, magazines specialized in fashion inevitably present a terminological approach and very different terms compared to Internet blogs intended for a non-specialist audience. It will also be necessary to distinguish the terms and designations of the written texts from the terminology of the oral, as it appears, for example, in the videos published online. Thus the analysis of the lexicon used in the representation of a specific event so remarkable can be considered as a privileged case for the study of the terminology of the mode, whose presentation constitutes an outline within a line of research devoted to the study of the specialized text and to the characters of the specialized communication of the field of fashion.