The Language of Fashion

The Writings of Roland Barthes 141

magazines used language in a rhetorical style which then chimed with
the consumer’s ‘taste’. Barthes makes this point clearly in ‘“Blue is in
Fashion This year’”, calling this rhetorical writing an ‘écriture’, albeit a
‘poor literature’.
Though this is a linguistic (rather than strictly literary) understanding, in
an interview the following year in 1961, he famously compared literature
and fashion (1972: 152), describing both as ‘homeostatic systems’, their
function being ‘not to communicate... but only to create a functioning
equilibrium’; they signify ‘nothing’, he suggested, and ‘their essence is
in the process of signification, not in what they signify’.
as early as 1959, Barthes was talking about clothes as a ‘text without
end’ (see Chapter 2 here). Furthermore, the mid-1960s was a moment
when more modernist literary values could be part of a challenge to
the growing consumerist culture of de Gaulle’s technocratic France.
Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Les Choses, subtitled a ‘history of the
1960s’, is an anti-materialist take on fashion, with the main characters,
Jérome and Sylvie, able to understand only the language of labels and
materials. It was an early example of young people becoming aware
and radicalized by society’s tendency to encourage us, in Erich Fromm’s
words, ‘to have rather than to be’. Literature, modern literary criticism,
the literary, could act as a corrosive, destabilizing, even ‘terroristic
(Sheringham 2005: 305), element in the seemingly harmonious world of
shopping in monoprix. at the centre of a quarrel with arch-conservative
and Sorbonne racine specialist, raymond Picard, over traditional
literary criticism and its values, Barthes was well qualified for this role.
one glance at his 1967 piece on Chanel and Courrèges—especially
the opening paragraph—shows not only where Barthes stood whilst
watching the duel, but how much literature, the literary, was his guiding
light, as Chanel is shown by Barthes to be rather traditional and patrician
in her deployment of literary culture.^30
here Barthes’s work on literature and fashion began to dovetail. his
view of what he had done in S/Z, his reading and rewriting of Balzac’s
Sarrasine in 1968 and 1969, could easily be applied (if retrospectively)
back to his work on fashion: ‘I have changed the level of perception of
the object’ he commented to Stephen heath in 1971 (1985b: 135), ‘and
in so doing I have changed the object’. Semiology and structuralism had
therefore brought about a change in the act of the critic, what Barthes
calls elsewhere ‘parametrism’ (1972 [1964]: 275): ‘in the order of