Semantic and symbolic functions of Russian traditional clothing in the research of the cultural studies scholars, art historians, psychologists, and ethnographers

The approaches of scholars from different fields of humanities to the problem of symbolism in Russian traditional clothing show both common trends and differences due to specific aspects of their methodological bases and sources. The novelty of this article is that the author has analyzed different approaches to the study of semantic and symbolic functions of traditional clothing and has come to conclusion about the lack of attention to the image-associative function. For identifying the image-associative function, it is proposed to analyze the “firsthand” texts with descriptions of traditional clothing according to the words of informants or their descendants, records of contemporaries, etc.