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.