122 The Language of Fashion
same. Everyone is reflecting themselves in everyone else. of course, if
everyone is doing the same, then the various dimensions to our identity
are spread across the entire sum of those people known to each of us
and whose identities are in turn also refracted across the whole sum
and so on. In other words, not only was the human subject’s identity
located (or decentred) in anyone encountered by that subject, but also
human identity ‘escaped’ into the metabolic circuits of human society
where it lay beyond the control of either the individual or the collective.
This was a central element in any understanding of fashion; as one critic
has put it: ‘Fashion... flatters the universal desire for identity together
with the no less universal desire to be a multiplicity of persons’ (Lavers
1982: 161).
as with Kroeber (Carter 2003: 91), Barthes was not interested in a
simplistic ‘reflection’ theory in his account of clothing and fashion.^8 In
a dialectic with no origins, a dialogue between the human individual
and the ‘super-organic’—via decentred self-perception in the eyes of
others, themselves in the same position—the self (as multiple selves)
negotiates its complex and multiple self-reflections. This was not simply
an hegelian, narcissistic view of self caught in a complex web, but a
new development in mass human society dominated more and more
by the image (in photographs, cinema and television), which went so
far in Western society that humanity had, in Barthes’s words, ‘lost its
face’ ([1953] 1993a). It is not surprising then that structuralism—at
least in its French version—would grow out of a literary aesthetic such
as the nouveau roman which challenged all notions of reflection, would
look to ‘primitive’ societies (discussed in the work of Lévi-Strauss)
for explanations behind humanity’s trajectory and would increasingly
deploy a critique of those Western values that seemed incapable or
unwilling to reflect upon a crisis of reflection, upon humanity’s infinitely
irrelevant place in the universe. The inanimate (non-human) then
paradoxically took on the warmth of authenticity but thereby ran the
risk of re-romanticizing—in a spiral—the inhuman with human qualities.
In fact structuralism has been described as a form of anti-humanism
but like the nouveau roman it wanted mainly to question, decentre, our
emotional and affective investment in the inhuman and the inanimate.
here Fashion and clothing rules were an excellent example not
only of this decentred, ‘super-organic’ and complex world of mass
communications but also of just how important language (‘taste’ in all