The Language of Fashion

Preface xv

In the post-face to this anthology I have tried to describe in detail
the about turns, dead ends and significance of Barthes’s writings on
clothing and fashion. Though he never wrote about what (apparently)
the student of fashion would like to know about, i.e. the ‘technology’
of fashion forms, his work on how humans interact with clothing forms
is surely useful within theories of consumption and design. all of these
pieces by roland Barthes on clothing history and fashion should be
read then not simply as a complement and an aid to understanding
The Fashion System, but as a method in preparation and as a set of
writing techniques which reflect and inflect the debates and events both
during a key moment in French social history and in today’s twenty-first-
century world.

Notes

1 Interestingly Barthes starts writing on clothes and fashion history just as
the idea of a museum is mooted on this subject—in the end it takes until
1991 for a clothes museum to be finished in Paris, the Musée Galliera (
avenue Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie) in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
2 See maggie allison, ‘Elle magazine: From Post-war utopias to Those of
the new millennium’. In angela Kershaw, Pamela moores and hélène
Stafford (eds) The Impossible Space. Explorations of Utopia in French
Writing, Glasgow, Strathclyde modern Language Studies vol. 6, 2004,
237–64.