The Writings of Roland Barthes 123senses) was to maintaining society’s equilibrium and functioning—
what Carter calls, in his discussion of Thorstein veblen, the ‘collective,
authorless social process’ (2003: 49). This radical questioning and
decentring in 1950s thought also had its counterpart in historical
enquiry.
Though not strictly speaking ‘structuralist’, the group of historians
and social theorists gathered around the journal Annales was trying to
renew historical and social studies by urging it to take into account
the conflicting categories of ‘event’ and ‘structure’. against historicizing
history, its main theorist Lucien Febvre wanted a historical phenomenon
to be studied in relation to its milieu by paying regard to the links that
made up a more general ‘collective mentality’ in the past, what he
called ‘the mental baggage of an epoch’. Barthes borrowed this idea
for his work on France’s classical playwright racine (see 1992 [1963]:
157, published originally in Annales in 1960), in which he asserted that
literary history must be sociological, looking at activities and institutions,
not individuals. This link between form and institution was then inverted
by Barthes and smoothly reapplied to clothing history. Furthermore,
sensitive to Febvre’s argument of ‘periodising’ historical trends, where
Febvre argues for a human-centred and equilibrium-sensitive form of
historical dating (see Chapter 1, note 9 in this book), Barthes became
beholden also to Braudel’s ‘longue durée’ theory of social history, which
provides us with a clear link to Kroeber’s ‘super-organic’ view of social
change (Carter 2003: 96 n. 38).^9
This aspect of Barthes’s early work on clothing has been a key
influence on (French-speaking) fashion theorists. his view that the
most important thing is ‘the tendency of every corporeal cover to
insert itself into a formal, organized, normative system recognized
by society’ (see Chapter 1 here) has subsequently been used by
margerie, Poulenc, Davray-Piékolek and Guillaume in their chapter
on ornamentation, to suggest how religiosity and transgression led
to exclusion (in Klopp 1991: 143). Similarly, Philippe Perrot (1994)
quotes Barthes’s 1957 article on clothing history, almost verbatim,
when considering how difficult it is to track and explain clothing
‘form’ in history.^10 This influence is, however, much more to do with
an Annales-inspired social history than with a structuralist view of
fashion per se. Therefore, the danger of losing the subject in history,
as structuralism is frequently accused of doing, does not have its