The Writings of Roland Barthes 147Thus, in a complete reversal of our ‘modesty’ view of clothing, fashion
does not exist, Barthes seemed to be suggesting, in order to cover the
body; rather it is the body which is the support for the garment. This is
fine as far as a conception of clothes’ relationship to the body goes, but
Barthes was maybe being a little unfair on hegel; and this has a bearing
on our assessment of Barthesian fashion theory. For, what Barthes
does not say about hegel’s account of clothes is that hegel, though
writing as early as the 1820s (see 1975: 742–50, esp. 746–48), was
deeply conscious of ‘modern’ clothing and fashion, particularly in its
opposition to the ancient Greek conception of clothes and specifically
to the way in which classical sculpture represented this conception.
What is interesting in looking back at hegel after reading Barthes is just
how much of hegelian thought returns, in spiral, in Barthes’s fashion
theory. Indeed, it is difficult not to see the reasons for hegel’s dismissal
of modern clothing as parallel, if not central, to Barthes’s own inversion
as outlined in his discussion of Erté.
‘Ideal art’, as hegel calls it, like clothing, ‘conceals the superfluity of the
organs which are necessary, it is true for the body’s self-preservation, for
digestion etc., but for the expression of the spirit, otherwise superfluous’
(745). The key expression here, and distinctly hegelian, is ‘expression
of the spirit’. For what hegel seems to be saying is that nudity is a
direct contrast to the expression of the ‘spirit’ in clothes. and so, just
as Barthes tries to invert the relationship between clothes and body,
between signified and signifier, to arrive at a more modern—dare I say
‘symbolist’—understanding of clothing forms and fashion statements,
so precisely does hegel with nudity. rather than seeing nudity in
classical Greek sculpture from the ‘modesty’ point of view, hegel sees
nudity itself as a signifier of strength, of spiritual beauty, in both its
naivety and ingenuity.^39 In fact the whole point of hegel’s discussion—
and this fits with Barthes’s own work on the ‘realism’ of representation
in sculpture in his reading of Balzac’s short story Sarrasine—is that
modern clothing may seem to be ‘most advantageous’ in the way
that ‘closely fitting clothes’ do very little to conceal the shape of the
limbs or the posture of the human being, and ‘are the least hindrance
because they make visible the whole form of the limbs as well as man’s
walk and his gestures’ (746). But this ‘advantage’ is shallow and empty
for hegel: ‘What we really see in [modern clothing, as represented in
modern statues and pictures]... is not the fine, free, and living contours