114 The Language of Fashion
Introduction
It is perhaps surprising that the novelist and writer alison Lurie, in a
later edition of her study The Language of Clothes, should maintain the
following comment: ‘Sociologists tell us that fashion too is a language
of signs... and roland Barthes... speaks of theatrical dress as a
kind of writing... none of these theorists, however, have gone on to
remark what seems obvious: that if clothing is a language it must have
a vocabulary and a grammar like other languages’ (1992: 3–4). roland
Barthes’s The Fashion System (published in France in 1967) was first
translated into English in 1985, and should have provided Lurie’s second
edition with ample evidence of Barthes’s thesis: that fashion, as a
‘written’ phenomenon, does have a vocabulary and a grammar, and this
is precisely what his Fashion System set out to analyse. Indeed, as this
collection of Barthes’s writings on fashion theory shows, the form that
clothes have taken in general was swiftly compared by Barthes to a form
of language. In fact Barthes was one of the first to deploy semiology—
originally conceived by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the
start of the twentieth century as a branch of linguistics—to the study
of fashion; and it could be argued furthermore that it was his use of
semiological method—the division of the means of communication
between humans into signs, and then into the sign’s constituent parts,
the signifier and the signified—that was bound to lead to his view that
fashion was a language, with a vocabulary and a grammar.
So Lurie’s comment is a rather irrelevant one, even if, as has been
hinted, The Fashion System ‘is the most boring book ever written
about fashion’ (moeran 2004: 36). What is at stake then in Barthes’s
work on fashion is the extent to which his ‘linguistic-semiological’
analysis is successful. olivier Burgelin, former collaborator of Barthes’s
for the journal Communications and an early listener to Barthes’s
views on clothing in 1959 (Calvet 1994: 132), wrote provocatively in
relation to the Fashion System: ‘with brutal inelegance’, hadn’t Barthes
‘taken 300 pages to write his monumental but indigestible analysis
and whose “ideological payback” was not palpably higher than that
of Mythologies, where he had taken three pages to get each of his
points across?’ (1974: 16). But Burgelin was not about to break off his
friendship with Barthes with such a comment. at the same time—and
this is the sense of Burgelin’s ‘double’ view of Barthes’s ambiguous