The Writings of Roland Barthes 119tricks, the brain) thereby losing its metaphorical specificity: in the
Labyrinth ‘metaphorical power is at once applicable to everything but
also poor’. Barthes attributed the poverty of the Labyrinth metaphor to
the ‘pregnancy of the story, of the myth’ and his interest in the Labyrinth
metaphor is attached then not to what a Labyrinth is, or to how many
are there, nor even to how to get out, but to the question of where
a Labyrinth begins. This attentiveness to the ‘viscosity of forms’, to
‘progressive consistencies’, thresholds, intensities, reflects an interest
in liminality that is crucial to his work on clothing—for example, ‘Where
does clothing begin?’ or ‘Where does clothing end?’
Barthes applied a deeply hegelian sensibility to change and structure,
the very dualistic being of Form, to a subject which is both ubiquitous
and yet impoverished in its social existence. ‘Clothing is what we clothe
ourselves in’, would perhaps be the relevant Barthesian tautology. and
yet, not only are the combinations and productions of clothing forms
all around us, discussed, designed, purchased and then deemed
finished, but also clothing is potentially the most basic of human
forms of communication. It is this dialectic between richness/ubiquity
and banality/caducity that underpins Barthes’s work on apparel. It is
here perhaps that we find the ultimate strength of Barthesian theory of
fashion. as with his writings on literature, on petty bourgeois ideology,
on historiography, Barthes comes closest to being able to be both
inside and outside Form and we will make some tentative conclusions
on the politics of form at the end of this essay. It would appear that
Barthes wishes to sit happily at once in the deeply critical, pessimistic
camp—represented by Lefebvre, the early Baudrillard, Perec or
the Situationists—for whom fashion is a commodity, a ‘constraint’,
and where fetishism rules supreme—but then also to sit in the more
optimistic, ‘appropriation’ camp—represented by Lipovetsky (1994
[1987]), later Baudrillard, Certeau and maffesoli—where fashion can be
seen to represent positive and potentially democratic options.^2
It is the contention of this essay, then, that it is precisely Barthes’s
formalism, that is his sensitivity to Form, from the ‘inside’ as much
from the ‘outside’, which allows him to straddle and swing between
these radically insuperable differences of opinion. So, just as Barthes
suggested that it is futile to search for the ‘origins’ of fashion and was
not asserting the importance of human communication to the wearing of
clothes in order then to reassign a new fundamental origin to clothing, it