120 The Language of Fashion
is then perhaps just as futile to look for a key moment or phenomenon,
a primal object, which urges Barthes to look at clothing. however, a
number of contributing circumstances can be more accurately located,
of which personal circumstances were the first.
Barthes found himself, for various reasons including illness, without
a career in the 1950s but at the same time was interested in the
growth of sociology and a participant in the burgeoning popular theatre
movement. needless to say, clothing, or ‘costume’ as they say in French
with all its theatrical connotations, was bound to be a starting point.
having written on theatre costumes for the popular theatre movement,
and having also regretted the way hairstyles seemed to be dictated
to people by the growth of the cinema star—see ‘visages et figures’
(1953/1993a)—Barthes was invited by Georges Friedmann in 1955 to
work with his friend Edgar morin on the history of work clothes. nothing
came of this or seems to remain of this work, though there are important
sections in The Fashion System on ‘work’ clothes within fashion (see
Chapter 18) where Barthes notes how some fashions gesture towards
the image of work as a sign ultimately of leisure.^3 It is here that Barthes’s
systematic study of clothing began. already, in a number of lesser-
known mythological studies from the mid-1950s, he had spoken of the
‘endimanchement’ (Sunday-besting) of the child in the clothing worn
in advertising features, suggesting that the instigation of a ‘Sunday
best’ ideology was a crucial function of children’s clothing (see ‘Enfant-
copies’, 1993b [1955], 461–2). however, another, earlier friendship had
perhaps helped Barthes into the world of clothing.
Introduced to algirdas Julien Greimas (known as ‘Guy’) in Egypt
in the late 1940s, Barthes was quickly influenced by his knowledge
of Saussure, Jakobson and Brø ́ ndal (Calvet 1994: 94–5). Greimas
had recently been awarded his doctorate in Paris, which at that time
required a main thesis and a thèse secondaire. The main thesis was
on the language of fashion in 1830, using fashion publications from the
period, and the second went on to show how social life in the France
of 1830 was reflected in this vocabulary.^4 Greimas was to go on to
become one of France’s most important semiologists and his 1955
article commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Saussure’s Course
in General Linguistics is an important statement of the contemporary
applicability of Saussurian method.^5 Indeed, Greimas is a constant
reference point for Barthes’s work on Saussure and semiology.^6 It is