144 The Language of Fashion
appendix on Kroeber in The Fashion System that ‘It is destructured on
the only level that we see of it: present-dayness’ (1985a: 299, translation
modified). Indeed, much as Barthes claimed to be a ‘formalist’, to be
highly wary if not sceptical of attempts to link form to history, and to link
form to ideological content, nevertheless his reading of hippies in 1969
(chapter 12 here) is precisely that. having suggested in 1966 that it was
wrong to infer a feminization of young men from the move to long hair
influenced by the Beatles—there is no form which is inherently feminine,
he insists, in the round-table discussion (chapter 8 here)—his 1969 view
of hippies does involve a structural interpretation of the hippies’ social
revolt via clothing styles.
It is worth pointing out that Barthes’s critique of hippy clothing and
style, ‘a Case of Cultural Criticism’ (chapter 12 here), was published
in a section of the Communications special number in 1969 on
‘Cultural Politics’ called ‘The Situation and the Political Challenge
made by Cultural action’; and Barthes’s conclusion—that the hippy
is an ‘inverted bourgeois’—reflected the journal’s radical critique of
‘recuperation’ following the may 1968 events. Though his is a content-
based description—one which his earlier fashion work seemed to want
to avoid—it is also a highly political one. The lifestyle politics of the
hippy—the form of the hippy’s politics if you like, and here Barthes
may be seen to be true to his formalist leanings—does not manage
to break with the established, dominant ideology underpinning normal
social and cultural praxis. a similar point could be made about his view
that Chanel’s invention of a woman’s suit goes back to a period of
history when a minority of women were beginning to go out to work
(see chapter 11 here). however, beneath the skilful essayism of the
final paragraph of this essay in Marie Claire—in which Barthes neatly
steps out of, or offers us the chance to step outside, fashion—there is
evidence perhaps of a tiredness with fashion as an object of semiological
study; and thus ‘interpretation’—rather than a systematic treatment of
fashion lan guage—can be seen to make a (brief) return in his work.^34
It is may 1968 which acts as the main catalyst towards this return to
interpretation.
We need only look at the difference in tone between Barthes’s only
piece on fashion written after may 1968 (excepting the extracts from
The Fashion System appearing in Change) and what has gone before it.
Indeed, the radical nietzschean negativity evident in ‘a Case of Cultural