The Language of Fashion

Preface xi

methodological overview is also an early statement of Barthes’s intention
to use Saussure’s semiology, Annales-inspired historical sociology and
the newfangled science of structuralist linguistics, in an attempt to
establish a viable history and sociology of clothing form. ‘Language and
Clothing’, a book review for Critique appearing in 1959, then represents
an important development in this work on clothing form in history, as
Barthes slowly moves away from the ambitious programme of his
earlier ‘history and Sociology of Clothing’ and towards the language
of clothes. It contains the first hints of his interest in a sociology of
contemporary fashion styles, following the realization that a history of
clothing forms would require a major team of researchers, something not
about to happen in late 1950s France despite the growth in sociology
and the expansion of social research in this period. So Barthes sets out
a clear definition of how structural linguistics and phonological analysis
could be used as the basis of a sociological approach to clothing.
‘Towards a Sociology of Dress’, another book review, published this
time in Annales in 1960 just as Barthes took up his research post at
the vIth section of the Ecole Pratique des hautes Etudes (EPhE) in
Paris, is a comparison of the psychological works on clothing by Franz
Kiener and John Carl Flügel, in which Barthes prefers the latter for its
structured and fruitful insights. The former is criticized for its preference
for an anthological description of the diversity of clothing forms, at the
expense of a consideration of the relative signifying values informing
each item. Barthes thus argues, in good structuralist fashion, for a
‘functional’ rather than a ‘substantial’ description and for a structural
rather than an anthological approach, in which a syntactic and not a
lexical study of clothes is preferred.
This first shift in Barthes’s clothing theories—from substance to
function—is a crucial one in defining his work through the 1960s. Part II
of this anthology—Systems and Structures—covers the period leading
up to The Fashion System, published with great expectations in 1967,
and shows the workings behind Barthes’s linguistic and structuralist
‘turn’. ‘Blue is in Fashion this year’, appearing in the newly launched
Revue Française de Sociologie in 1960, is subtitled ‘a note on research
into Signifying units in Fashion Clothing’. This long article is his first
foray proper into fashion (as opposed to clothing history). Building on
the work in his brief essays on women’s press in Mythologies (1957),
Barthes headed for Elle and Jardin des Modes, to apply a semiological