150 The Language of Fashion
is nothing ‘but a system of empty signs’; ‘fashion clothing signifies
incessantly, but it signifies nothing’ and thus fashion is like literature
when ‘it refuses functionality’. Fashion may be literary in the way that it
quotes from the history of language utterances and clichés, but it is when
fashion communicates (mallarmé’s) nothingness that it comes closest
to the literary, argues Fortassier. She is following the ‘late’ Barthes for
whom the very emptiness of haiku poetry is a Zen-like ‘degree zero’ of
meaning, where the ‘babble’ of language and meaning is momentarily
(and perhaps rather utopianly) suspended, a babble which, if current
fashion shows are anything to go by (mullan 2002), is seemingly getting
worse.
The pleasure and promotion of the signifier in the early 1970s was
trademark Barthesian ‘textuality’ and it culminated, in fashion terms, with
the view that Erté’s feminized alphabet reverses the usual conception
of the body and clothing within appearance, to suggest that the female
fashion model prolongs the fashion item through her body, and not
(as we might expect) the other way round. This could be seen as a
formalist game of inverting functions, uses and bodily aesthetics, or
alternatively as a deconstructive, terroristic attack on fixed ideas of form
and content, on the latent/manifest relationship, which equalizes (or
‘de-hierarchizes’) the function and form of the human body in relation
to clothing, a tactic that is classic post-1968 avant-garde essayism.
Perhaps Barthes is also suggesting that it is facile, false to find or even
look for the personality behind or in clothing. This is not simply because
the self/apparel relationship is a deeply complex one, but also because
the self itself is a complex one, locked in a dialectic of hiding and showing
for which clothing is ultimately a poor and limited communicator. and
it may be that Barthes too is a victim of fashion. Godfrey (1982: 32)
argues that the death of the dandy has been prematurely announced,
seeing the dandy as essentially an ironic figure, both inside and outside
society: we might suggest then that Barthes himself could wear the
‘dandy’ label without too much difficulty, and this certainly in terms of
his own literary or intellectual ‘fashionability’.
But ‘newness’ theory, as deployed by Lipovetsky (1994), cannot be
applied to all of Barthes’s work and then be allowed to expel ‘distinction’
(or class-based, historical theories) on fashion. It is too simplistic perhaps
to see Barthes’s structuralism as one which ‘evacuates’ the human
subject: on the contrary, the manner in which the signifier–signified link