The Writings of Roland Barthes 115relationship to fashion—Burgelin recognized that Barthes’s journey
from Mythologies in 1957 was considerable: ‘he has situated himself
in relation to Fashion’, Burgelin concluded, ‘in such a way that was
radically new and which remains impregnably original’ (16).
It is this contradiction which sits at the heart of Barthes’s writing
on fashion. on the one hand, The Fashion System can appear turgid,
heavy, long, too methodical, even rebarbative (Carter 2003: 144);
on the other, it is a crucial and repeatedly useful reference point for
any theorization of fashion worth its salt. This contradiction explains
perhaps why there has been so little secondary criticism of The Fashion
System in the English-speaking world since Barthes’s death in 1980
and the explosion of interest across the 1980s and 1990s in his writings
other than The Fashion System.^1 and if The Fashion System has been
overlooked in Barthes’s oeuvre, then there is a further paradox. Like
much of Barthes’s theory, his writing on fashion seems to percolate
slowly, in fragmentary form, into fashion theory; it is regularly cited,
incidentally, here and there; and yet it is not treated as a body of writing.
This has much to do, I am sure, with the ‘postmodern’ spirit of the
last two decades of the twentieth century; and perhaps now, with the
dust beginning to settle on postmodernism, is a propitious moment in
which to begin an assessment of Barthes’s fashion theory. In this essay,
therefore, I hope to show how Barthes moves across the 1960s, from
his earliest work on clothes in the late 1950s to his growing fascination
with the body in the early 1970s. We will look specifically then at the
passage from his ‘high structuralism’ of 1966 (exemplified by ‘an
Introduction to the Structural analysis of narratives’, Sontag 1982) to
the more sceptical use of structuralism in his S/Z of 1970, which was
tantamount to a ‘mutation’, a ‘rupture’: in short, how he moved from
structuralism to post-structuralism. It is this move from seeing fashion
as major social object of French mass culture to deeming fashion to be
essentially ‘empty’ that we will set out to explore. how could Barthes
at one stage consider this innocuous social obligation—to cover the
body—as part of a wider social signification with a fullness of human
meaning, and then relegate this phenomenon to the status of
legerdemain, a form of trickery? It is possible that working from 1957
to 1969 on clothing, against left-wing intellectual norms, Barthes finally
ended up agreeing with those who had originally been suspicious of
his work. But, as with all of Barthes’s thought, it is firstly a question of