124 The Language of Fashion
roots (with regard to Barthes’s early work on clothing at least) in
Febvre’s or the Annales view of history. after all, Febvre’s historical
work is fundamentally concerned with the vécu (lived experience) of
human actants in the past. Then again, Barthes is also influenced
by Gurvitch’s Durkheimian conception of sociology, which aimed to
get beyond considering society as merely the sum of its individuals.
So, by being dialectical in its notion of a social totality, his ‘historical
sociology’, dependent on a tight Gurvitchian ‘total’ sociology and an
Annales-inspired attention to the vécu was to become the basis of
Barthes’s social psychology of fashion. If Barthes the structuralist is
rightly accused of ignoring the ‘subject in history’, ironically this phase
of his career was coincidental with a desire for a total and subjective
understanding of humans’ interest in fashion. To consider this paradox
further, we must look at the competing epistemologies to explain the
theoretical moves Barthes made across the 1960s.
Before doing this, it is worth pointing out the limits of my analysis
here. Within Barthes’s work on clothing and fashion, there are competing
spheres of interest—the body, theatre, photography—that we will not have
time to explore. Clothing was clearly an important concern for a popular
theatre activist keen to point to the ‘Illnesses in theatre costumes’—an
article he wrote in 1955 (1972 [1964]) which were holding back a truly
people’s theatre and Barthes divided the ‘thought-out’ theatre costume
into the ‘healthy’ and the folkloric and ‘unthought-out’ costume into the
‘ill’. The body was also a key component in his work on theatre as much
as on myth, literature and historiography and the body and theatre
costumes meet in his commentary on photography of a production of
a Brecht play in 1960.^11 and, obviously, Barthes’s clothing and fashion
writings—and not just The Fashion System—are radically concerned
with how the body is made to signify via apparel. So his work on clothing
was bound to bring back an optic that he had explored in ‘visages et
figures’ in 1953: namely that the body, not just the face, is alienated by
its ‘writing’ of fashion via a system (just like literature or dramaturgy)
that is stereotyped, not thought out (‘pensé’). This is the body not as
instinct but as writing, an optic which finds its utopian dimension in his
1971 book Sade, Fourier, Loyola.^12 This discrimination of clothes from
the body notwithstanding, the link between the body and clothing in
Barthes’s thought will return in the discussion of hegel at the conclusion
of this essay.