xii Preface
understanding of language that will finally become the basis of The
Fashion System, and in choosing the former he was looking at a
hugely popular and highly contradictory women’s publication launched
immediately after the Second World War and not immune to a utopian
ideology.^2 Taking the language of fashion found in women’s fashion
magazines as a signifying system, this study is the earliest version of
the method to be used in The Fashion System. making eighteen general
points on fashion as a language, this article clearly anticipates the section
on ‘method’ in The Fashion System, but there are also sections on
nominalization and generalization, on proportionality between signifier
and signified, on colour codes and on problems of taxonomy, which are
eventually excluded from his magnum opus on fashion systems, these
either being taken as read or heavily abridged in The Fashion System.
The article also restricts itself to establishing a possible classification of
‘vestemes’, not venturing into a systematic inventory as in The Fashion
System. above all, the article is a clear, concise and tentative explanation
of structural linguistics as a possible method for understanding fashion,
which serves as an excellent introduction to Barthes’s later research. at
the same time as beginning to systematize fashion forms in post-war
France, Barthes reflects, in parallel and in the fine essayistic style of
French writers, on other aspects of clothing and ‘meaning’ in fashion
forms. ‘From Gemstones to Jewellery’, published in the specialist arts
journal Jardin des Arts in 1961, shows him at his most brilliant. The
essay is also an important statement of the role of ‘detail’ in fashion, a
structuralist, even proto-post-structuralist, analysis which sees the tiniest
detail—jewellery—as affecting the whole clothing ensemble. Barthes also
discusses how gemstones as natural minerals then became symbols of
the non-human and benefited from the poetics of human imagination,
thereby earning their paradoxical status as items of seduction and of
purity. Barthes thus performs a kind of structural socio-psychology of
the gemstone’s substance and he tries to explain its transformation,
after passing through feminization, secularization and democratization,
into a crucial fashion item, despite its size and non-human substance.
Similarly, ‘Dandyism and Fashion’, published in the Franco-american
cultural magazine United States Lines Paris Review in 1962, is both a
skilful piece of literary essayism, highly provisional in its conclusions,
but also a rigorously structuralist account of this masculine dressing
phenomenon. It is an impressive historical survey, using sociological