78 The Language of Fashion
14 Beliefs and ideologies point to the intelligible in which they participate, not
through what they declare (their explicit content), but through the manner
in which they declare it (their forms).
15 Corpus: intangible synchronic collection of utterances on which one is
working (martinet, Eléments, p. 37 [English trans. p. 39]; see note 6).
16 Barthes, ‘Language and Clothing’ [see chapter 2 in this book].
17 on this problem, see infra.
18 The notion of language synchrony is one of the most disputed in
structural linguistics—reservations made by Paul Guillaume [see his La
Psychologie de la forme, Paris, Flammarion, 1979 (first published in 1930),
esp. 200–04, and chapter vIII], r. Jakobson, and Cl. Lévi-Strauss,
Anthropologie structurale, p. 102 [trans. by Claire Jacobson and Brooke
Grundfest Schoepf, ny/London, Basic Books, 1963, 88–9; this is Lévi-
Strauss’s critique of haudricourt and Granai’s 1955 collaborative work on
‘linguistics and sociology’, in which Lévi-Strauss uses Jakobson to show
that synchrony and diachrony are separate only in a theoretical sense].
19 There are seasonal Fashions within any one year; but the seasons are
not so much a diachronic series as a selection of different signifieds; in its
‘essence’ Fashion changes but once a year (this is the ‘look’).
20 We are even not worried that we used examples from other synchronies
when we needed to check something or when there was an interesting
example.
21 In fact this differential sociology remains problematic; for mass society
develops perhaps collective representations which from then on become
universal: the socius goes back to being the anthros.
22 This choice was not however arbitrary: Elle and Echo de la Mode are
popular magazines (the latter more so than the former), and Vogue and
Jardin des Modes more ‘aristocratic’.
23 Disparity in frequency is important for sociology, but not for a system;
it tells us something about the tastes, the ‘obsessions’ of a particular
magazine (and therefore of its audience), but not about the general
structure.
24 We have therefore adopted a restricted definition of Fashion in relation to
that given by Lazarsfeld and Katz (aesthetics, make-up, clothes).
25 The Fashion utterances [les énoncés] are cited without references: for, in
the semiological inventory, they have a purely functional and not historical
value, following exactly the examples of grammarians.
26 For example, how to structure the variant in Form or how to list typical
associations. But these empirical or intuitive notations have been accepted
to the extent that they allowed us to move (in the final stages) towards
an inventory of real clothing (notably the infringements upon the rules of