The Writings of Roland Barthes 157michel Butor, Jean-Paul aron, with two fragments by Balzac and one by
mallarmé, finishing with Jean-Pierre Faye’s piece on mallarmé and then
Eric Clemens’s and Barthes’s pieces on fashion rhetoric.
38 It is worth remembering also that Change is about to go through a rather
nasty and bitter public argument with its radical counterpart Tel Quel; Faye
resigns from Tel Quel in disgust, and Barthes defends the latter against
Change.
39 Though Lemoine-Luccioni (28) quotes (curiously) hegel, and then Lévi-
Strauss’s Mythologiques vol. 4. L’homme nu (Paris, Plon, 1971), as saying
that the nude does not signify. For this reason, Luccioni-Lemoine rejects
the signifier–signified dichotomy when it makes the body into the signified
of fashion, because there is no such thing, she argues following a ‘zero-
degree’ optic, as a nude body (43).
40 here in 1978, Barthes’s emphasis is on how the body has been
hidden, suggesting that aristocratic clothes and work clothes signalled
the wearer’s social class. But with work clothes, he goes on, this led
paradoxically to the body being ‘exteriorized’, ‘identified as occupying
a particular place in a social hierarchy’ (913). Interestingly also, Barthes
suggests here in 1978 that the gregariousness of contemporary clothing
means that the body is inflected by clothing forms and styles (Barthes’s
example is hairstyles), to the extent that differences between the sexes in
clothing have all but disappeared (914).