The Writings of Roland Barthes 117the écrivain over the écrivant—and this was brilliantly illustrated in his
polemical 1966 essay on the role of the literary critic, Criticism and
Truth. But what did this mean when it came to the critic confronted with
fashion and clothing? This is precisely the essayist’s (even the essay’s)
very wager: to systematize the world in a form that is aesthetic yet
responsible, playful yet grown-up, questioning but mindful of closure
(mindful of closure but still questioning, if you like), distant but still
political.
Thus Barthes was asking very pertinent questions about human
society. maybe, if Chomsky was right about humanity’s innate ability
to generate grammar, then there was also, Barthes was suggesting,
an innate human tendency towards literature, narrative, stories (Sontag
1982: 251–2). For an understanding of fashion—if taken as a language—
this suggestion is crucial: we are innately obliged to narrate clothing
forms either verbally or mentally; if we do not do this when thinking
about clothing, especially fashion, then a magazine, an advert, a friend,
a shopworker, whatever, will do it for us. ‘It is impossible to consider
a cultural object outside the articulated, spoken and written language
which surrounds it’, Barthes opined in 1967 (1985b: 65). It is precisely
this idea—that verbalizing the real, or our desires, is a core human
activity, especially when we are confronted with daily objects in human
society—that may become one of the key theories linked to the name
of roland Barthes. In fashion, it justifies Barthes’s concentration on the
written or ‘represented’ garment (Carter 2003: 149–52), pace the anti-
intellectualism of a clothes designer such as Ian Griffiths (White/Griffiths
2000: 78–9). and therefore the view that we constantly verbalize the real
helps also to go beyond a mere ‘reflection’ theory of fashion whereby
a person is shown simply to reflect their personality/psychology/social
standing in their appearance (Carter 152), and to look for a more subtle,
‘refractive’ view of fashion which incorporates the impersonalist manner
in which form influences taste. In this impersonalist schema, the romantic
notion of ‘inspiration’, in everything, from literature to fashion, was
anathema to Barthes in ascendant scientific mode. however, it cannot
be stressed enough that his interest in finding a scientific understanding
of fashion form is always dependent on the essayist’s obedience to
provisionality. and here Barthes was at the cutting edge of avant-garde
theories of fashion, though, curiously, he wrote precious little on avant-
garde fashion itself, despite the abundance of examples in the modern