Talking to Oneself. A Semiotic Analysis of Donald Trump’s Hair Style

The article presents a semiotic analysis of Donald Trump’s hairstyle. The exposition follows the inquiry step by step. Firstly the sample to analyse is established. Any single text (verbal or visual) is linked to the correspondent web resource so that the reader can compare her/his view with the author’s. Incidentally, an explanation of how a hairdo can be considered a text is given, in the frame of the semiotic studies of clothing started by R. Barthes. Accordingly, hairdressing is an act of dressing, which, in its turn, is a part of self-presentation behaviour. The first level of the text, the expression, is then analysed, establishing how Trump’s hairdressing is technically obtained. The rest of the work is devoted to the most important semiotic element, namely, the content or, following the pragmatic approach – adopted by the author – interpretation. The interpretive model used to describe the particular hairdo of the American President is that of fictional narrations, resulting from a combination of the semiotics of text and of Goffman’s theory of social role playing. Social narrations are explained as well as their relations to social hierarchies. The first result is that Donald Trump’s hairstyle is an idiolect, that is, a language spoken only by one individual, and an aesthetic one, to be precise. To find the specific interpretant of this particular self-presentation choice we must move on to the metasemiotic level: the meaning of using a language. Here a hypothesis emerges: Trump’s hair style communicates a sort of self-presentation autism. The last step of the analysis consists in the attempt at developing the pragmatic consequences of the text. An attempt, of course, to be tested by future research.