Preface
The principal aim of this book is to bring together in one publication
those writings on clothes and fashion by roland Barthes which have
yet to be translated into English. If Barthes is known for The Fashion
System (1967, English translation 1985), his seminal if complex treatise
on fashion systems and on how fashion is ‘written’, it is perhaps less
known that he wrote also on hippies, on jewellery, and extensively on
methodological problems within clothes history. It was this gap in both
Barthes scholarship and in Fashion Studies that encouraged michael
Carter to ask me to translate and edit these writings. We have decided,
however, not to include in this volume two of Barthes’s writings on
theatrical costume; we considered that his important piece on the
excesses and iniquities of certain types of theatre-costume design exists
already in English translation, in a slightly abridged version in Barthes’s
Critical Essays (1972 [1964]), and that, although the original version
(appearing in Théâtre Populaire in 1955) has witty commentaries on
photographs of certain costume disasters, we did not want to confuse
the volume with considerations on the theatre. The same applies to
Barthes’s other (brief) essay on theatre costume, a 1955 review of
hélène Parmelin’s livre d’artiste covering five twentieth-century costume
designers in France. other pieces on fashion, other than The Fashion
System itself, are indeed available in English and are therefore not
included here—mainly interviews given by Barthes around the time of
the publication of The Fashion System—which can be found in The
Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962–1980 (trans. Linda Coverdale, new
york: hill and Wang, 1985, 43–67).
The idea of this book, initiated by michael Carter, was to concentrate
on the key writings on clothing that predate The Fashion System, in
which Barthes tries to establish how and why people have dressed