The Fashion Businessliterature, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, semiotics, structuralism,
Marxism, feminism and others. Malcolm Barnard insists that ‘because fashion
and clothing impinge on so many disciplines they must be studied in terms
of those disciplines’.^14 Few writers recognize this as a problem. Elizabeth
Wilson, for example, urges that the ‘attempt to view fashion through several
different pairs of spectacles simultaneously’ is congruent with the post-
modernist aesthetic to which fashion, with its ‘obsession with surface, novelty
and style for style’s sale’ is particularly well-suited.^15 For the student of
fashion, the disadvantage with this fragmentary academic configuration is
the uncertainty of obtaining the insight he or she seeks from a particular
text. James Laver anticipated the problem with his reference to Carlyle’sSartor
Resartus and its central character ‘Teufelsdröck, Professor of things-
in-general’, author of the imaginary book ‘Die Kleider, ihr Werden und
Wirken’ (‘Clothes, their Origin and Influence’). The book is said to contain
various anecdotes which hint tantalizingly at conclusions about the import-
ance of clothing in society, but, Laver writes, ‘it is soon clear that such
fantasies as a naked House of Lords are no more than a jumping off place
for meditations on the nature of man and his place in the universe. The truth
is that Carlyle was not interested in clothes as such, indeed he despised
them’.^16
Students of fashion are accustomed to the sense of frustration deriving
from texts which contain the word ‘fashion’ in their titles, but whose primary
interest lies in the pursuit of another field of study. Fashion, Culture and
Identity, for example, describes the aim of cultural scientists in looking at
fashion as being ‘to make sense of a phenomenon that has periodically
intrigued them, less for its own sake, unfortunately, than for the light they
thought it would shed on certain fundamental features of modern society’.^17
The author, Fred Davis, points out, quite correctly that ‘each science purports
to do some things and not others, and it is pointless to expect it to delve into
areas lying outside its established boundaries’.^18 There is, of course, no reason
why, say, a semiotician like Roland Barthes should wish to explore themes
relating specifically to the design, production or diffusion of clothes. The
Fashion System restricts itself rigorously to what the author describes as the
‘written garment’ using the texts accompanying illustrations in fashion
- Barnard, M., Fashion and Communication, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 20.
- Wilson, E., Adorned in Dreams: fashion and modernity, London: Virago, 1985, p. 11.
- Laver, J., Style in Costume, London: Oxford University Press p. 5, 1949.
- Davis, F., Fashion, Culture and Identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994,
p. 4. - Ibid., p. 114.