118 The Language of Fashion
period (see Stern 2004). Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that
Fashion has interested the avant-garde throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in France. This is not just in the work of Stéphane
mallarmé, to whose late nineteenth-century fashion writing Barthes’s
work has deep affinities (see Furbank/Cain’s introduction to mallarmé
2004: 10), but also in the radical film-making of one Jean-Luc Godard in
the 1988 film about the catwalk On s’est tous défilé (see Temple 1999).
and so it is to precursors in Barthes’s work that we must first turn.
Precursors to theorizing
fashion: The Labyrinth
In his final lectures at the Collège de France in Paris just before his death
in 1980, and concluding a collaborative set of lectures on ‘the Labyrinth’
(2003: 177), Barthes felt in a position to come clean about his work on
clothing and what he thought of the subject itself. he describes how,
in 1953 or 1954, he had met up with the philosopher maurice merleau-
Ponty to discuss work on a semiology of clothing. Quoting merleau-
Ponty, Barthes remembered a phrase from the discussion: clothing was
a ‘faux bon sujet’ (false good topic). applying this description to the
Labyrinth as metaphor, he suggests that a ‘false good topic’ is one
which exhausts itself or is exhausted from the start, which forces the
topic’s ‘development’ to be a repetition of the subject-word. In fine
Barthes style, he illustrated this with a tautology: ‘The Labyrinth is a
Labyrinth’.
The paradox of Barthes’s work on clothing and fashion is, then, a
fine paradox: how to research and write on a subject that, at best, has
nothing to be said about it, and at worst invites pure tautology. This is
an essayistic challenge typical of Barthes. he then goes on to say why
the Labyrinth is a ‘false good topic’ in ways which we could continue
to apply to clothing. Firstly, it is a form which is so well designed that
anything said about it appears to be within (‘en deçà’) the form itself;
‘the topic is richer than the general, the denotation than the connotation,
the letter than the symbol’; there is nothing to understand in a Labyrinth,
it cannot be summarized. Secondly, as a metaphor, the Labyrinth is
everywhere in human society (monuments, gardens, games, cities,