116 The Language of Fashion
how he gets to this position; and secondly where it subsequently leads
him. It would not then be unreasonable to consider Barthes’s work on
fashion under his favoured figure of the spiral: Barthes ends up in 1969
where he should have been in 1957, but further along the spiral.
michael Carter has suggested already the influence of Barthes on
fashion theory in general (2003, Chapter 8), building brilliantly up to this
in his collection of essays on fashion and clothes theorists. he suggests
(152) that the early writings might provide a much more rounded view of
clothing in Barthes’s thought. as we stated in the editors’ note, however,
it is important to unpack this area of study, and it is precisely Barthes’s
trajectory across the years 1957 to 1969 that allows us to do this. This
book stops at the more militant, surprising Barthes (see his 1969 interview
with John Whitley), when it is S/Z (1970), his terroristic reading of a
Balzac short story, that inaugurates a new phase in Barthes’s politico-
theoretical career, but not before he has dealt a subtle but distinctly
sharp critique of hippies and hippy fashion, in the 1969 article that
closes our anthology. Clearly, the thirteen very varied pieces collected
in this book represent a body of writing and research emerging across
a dramatic twelve-year period in France’s cultural and political history
(and are, by mere coincidence, roughly coterminous with General de
Gaulle’s period as French president). and yet they also show a Barthes
in intense theorization of both the form and the content of his own work,
applying new theories from inside (and more commonly outside) fashion
and clothing theory. These two roles—theorist and ‘product’ of his time,
that of the structuralist (over)determined by system and that of the
existentialist in voluntarist opposition to capitalism’s social structures—
meet in the figure and the writing praxis of the ‘essayist’.
‘Something out of nothing’ is how Barthes characterized his
achievement in an interview at the time of publication: The Fashion
System was a ‘poetic project’ because the semiologist had made an
object out of something that, if not entirely empty, had been ‘of great
frivolity and no importance’ (1985b, 67). In other words, said Barthes,
here was the importance of the ‘void’, of emptiness, that had begun
to dominate Western societies and which mallarmé had been first to
valorize: ‘the passion for meaning’ in which The Fashion System was
engaged found itself ‘in exemplary fashion in objects which were very
close to being nothing’ (ibid.). Barthes was thus acutely aware of the
power, responsibility but also aesthetic choices of the critic-writer,