128 The Language of Fashion
of this article—because the task of working on clothing would require a
‘vast information apparatus’ or because, as soon as one tries to break
down meaning in clothes it, like literature, ‘tends to evaporate’? or
both? or was the influence of structuralism now irresistible?
one answer comes in the famous 1971 interview in Tel Quel: ‘I
originally intended to perform a proper socio-semiology of Clothing, of
all Clothing (I had even done a bit of research on this); then, following a
private remark by Lévi-Strauss, I decided to homogenize the corpus and
restrict myself to written clothing (as described in fashion magazines)’
(Barthes 1971, 99). This explained in part the lateness with which The
Fashion System was finally published seeing as, by all accounts, it was
finished by 1963. Barthes also seemed to be suggesting in 1971 that
even though ‘“Blue is in Fashion This year”’, published in 1960, used
the exact methodology finally deployed in The Fashion System in 1967,
this methodology was actually only part of the original plan which was
to cover the whole of clothing and not just (written) fashion as found in
fashion magazines. This then makes the early preface to The Fashion
System (included in this book, Chapter 7) also pivotal, but pivotal not
so much to the move from clothing history to fashion system (this, as
we have seen, seemed to take place around 1959–60), but in relation
to how to present semiology given the rise of structuralism. In other
words, Barthes discarded this early preface, waited four years whilst
working within his new structuralist, ‘differential’ sensibility—as evident
in Elements of Semiology and then in his ‘Introduction to the Structural
analysis of narrative’—before then recasting the precise significance
of what he was doing in The Fashion System in applying semiology to
written fashion.
The crucial difference between the early preface and the final version
of the preface to The Fashion System then seems to hinge on the
‘semiology as part of linguistics’ inversion that Barthes operated on
Saussure’s original formulation, which had proposed that linguistics
be merely a part of a much wider science of signs that is semiology.
This is indeed hinted at in the opening paragraphs of the early preface,
but never once stated in the bold terms that we find in Elements of
Semiology and in the final preface to The Fashion System, and which
was then to so dismay the linguisticians mounin and martinet.
We can see once again then that structuralism ‘intervened’ between
1963 and 1967, both to obscure (but not deny) semiology, and to recast