132 The Language of Fashion
form of diachrony in fashion motivations would be to reintroduce the three
notions of protection, ornamentation and modesty that he had so readily
rejected. In this sense, the method deployed in ‘“Blue is in Fashion This
year”’, and expanded and fine-tuned in The Fashion System, follows on
entirely from the delusion described in Mythologies: it is precisely how,
by verbalizing, we convince ourselves of the fashionability of a form,
or combination of clothing forms. Though language has become the
basis of all human society across Barthes’s work of the 1960s, he still
maintains this interest in how language (including the verbalized image) is
our link to the real. and it is here that Culler is less critical of The Fashion
System. If Culler judges the vestimentary level of Barthes’s work on
the language of fashion as inadequate and confused, he is much more
persuaded by the rhetorical level of analysis. The rhetorical analysis in
The Fashion System suggests Culler (38–40) allows to us to see how
paradoxical the language of fashion is actually, both empty and yet easy
to fill with meaning, and in Culler’s view this has an importance that
goes beyond fashion and extends to the notion of ‘realism’ in literature,
and thence society at large. ‘realism’—and by extension the ‘real’—is
what any one historical moment deems it to be.
nevertheless, there is an order of tasks in The Fashion System that is
fully prepared by the work leading up to it: Barthes wanted to isolate and
analyse the system before looking at its rhetorical system. In dividing
a semiology of fashion systems from a sociological interpretation of
fashion forms—though the former ‘opens doors’ on to a sociology
of fashion—Barthes seemed to be following Gilles-Gaston Granger’s
view that there is an ambiguity in using semiology to understand non-
linguistic phenomena such as fashion.
Granger (1968: 133) was suggesting that there must be no confusion
between a semiological analysis of a signifying system (i.e. fashion), with
an interpretation of their ‘meanings’ within social praxis, that is with a
‘philosophy of advertising, political propaganda, cooking or clothes’.
Granger took the example of election manifestos. In opposition to
a sociological analysis of this material which looks at the potential
electorate, at political phenomena which come before the manifesto,
at previous campaigns, etc., Granger suggested that a semiological
analysis would look instead at these manifestos as part of a system,
showing how each one was a variant on various combinations, like the
syntagms in a language. The aim was to show the connotative function