x Preface
the way they do across the centuries, then to look at how Barthes
moved away from clothes history towards fashion theory, and finally
to set out where his analysis in The Fashion System went in the period
immediately following. I say clothes and fashion, as this reflects a clear
division in Barthes’s work. For, somewhere between 1959 and 1964,
a decision was made to concentrate more on contemporary (written)
fashion rather than on clothes (and their history). The division of this
anthology into three parts—Clothing History, Systems and Structures,
Fashion Debates and Interpretations—reflects these shifting concerns
in Barthes’s research and theoretical reflections.
The pieces presented in this book appeared originally in a variety of
publications in France—academic, journalistic and industry-related—of
which the social history journal Annales is the most preponderant. From
Marie Claire to a Catholic auxiliary nurses’ publication, from Critique to
Communications, Barthes’s writings on clothing and fashion are clearly
interdisciplinary enough to appear in a wide range of different places. They
all also chart the shifts, about-turns, ruptures and spirals of Barthes’s
thought across the fast-paced intellectual culture of 1960s France. In
twelve years, from 1957 to 1969, he goes from bemoaning the lack of
decent histories of clothing to denouncing hippy ethnic fashion as a
reactionary form of revolt, from using semiology to understand clothing
to seeing the rhetoric of fashion as an impoverished and ultimately
shallow producer of cultural forms, from considering the origins and
functions of gemstones to watching a ‘joust’ between the rival fashion
houses of Coco Chanel and andré Courrèges.
This anthology has been divided into three chronological sections
in order to take account of these different phases in Barthes’s thought
on clothing and fashion. The first part, Clothing History, shows Barthes
in search of a solution to the thorny problem of accounting for clothing
forms across history. ‘history and Sociology of Clothing’, published
in the influential journal Annales in 1957, is a historical overview of
hitherto existing studies on the history of clothing which discusses the
weaknesses in classical, romantic, folkloric, ‘archaeological’, marxist
and psychological accounts of clothing forms.^1 Barthes discusses in
detail the impasse of history and Structure, Change and order, within
the newly emerging discipline of Cultural Studies, bemoaning the
restrictive nature of the triumvirate dominating clothing explanations at
the time, namely those of protection, modesty and ornamentation. This