Comunicação e o sistema da moda: Autorreferência e Heterorreferência no desfile The Horn Of Plenty, por Alexander McQueen

This paper addresses the relationship between fashion and communication. Aiming to explain the occurrence of self-reference and hetero- reference – both of which are operations proper to an autopoietic system – within the fashion system, in Luhmann’s perspective, we elected as corpus seven dresses displayed in Alexander McQueen’s 2009-2010 Autumn-Winter fashion show The Horn of Plenty . In order to achieve the proposed objective, we betake Luhmann’s concepts of self-reference and hetero-reference, and analyze the dresses, by means of both those concepts and of Plaza’s modes of intersemiotic translation. The importance of the present paper lies upon the possibility to understand the production and reproduction of the fashion system, not through consumption tendency though. Keywords: fashion system, self-reference/hetero- reference, intersemiotic translation.