- Clothes make the man.
Patterns of social organization are generated through interaction between groups.
To this end, it must be possible to hold the relevant groups apart. Imagine a
football match where spectators were barred from displaying their allegiance to
or sympathy with one of the teams! It would be a different social event. A
symbolic repertoire of tokens of identity is indispensable; a flag, a sweatshirt, a
muffler that enables you to show what you identify with and unites you with
your soulmates. You are what you wear, or you are made to wear what ostensibly
you are.
Can identities be put on and slipped off like a T-shirt? Roland Barthes, one of the
most original observers of the 20th century, knew that the old adage, ‘clothes
make the man’, is still true (never mind the generic masculine). In the 21st
century it is even truer, but it means something different. Fashion, Barthes
understood, is essentially a modern phenomenon. Not that attire did not change
in pre-modern times; but in modernity, fashion performs the paradoxical function
of marking both individual distinction and collective community, in short, this
season’s identity. Join, if you can, be entirely your own self and part of the flock!
Fashion is quintessentially social, mediating individual and community needs.
Since Barthes wrote his essay Système de la Mode half a century ago, the
penetration of consumer capitalism into every sphere of everyday life has caused
fashion cycles to shorten considerably. Fast fashion, a business model that