126 The Language of Fashion
on racine in 1960. according to Calvet (1973: 82) the ‘differential’ turn
that Barthesian semiology was taking between Elements of Semiology
and The Fashion System was operated by his use of Trubetskoy’s
phonology, based rigorously as this was on a ‘differential’ taxonomy.
This, says Calvet (81), appeared most clearly in Barthes’s 1963 piece
‘The Structuralist activity’ (Barthes 1972) where for the first time he
looked at the sign in a ‘differential’ way.
however, the chronology is not as simple as might appear. Clearly,
the decision as early as 1959 to look at fashion as written (or verbalized)
clothing, as opposed to actually worn clothing, was an important factor
in this shift to seeing society based on language, here exemplified by
fashion. But we must remember that Barthes’s structuralist analysis of
narratives did not appear until 1966. unaware, it seems, that Barthes
had already mentioned Trubetskoy’s work on phonology and clothes
in 1957 and in 1959 (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this book), Calvet (1973:
83) is keen to suggest that an important shift does indeed take place
in Barthes’s thought around 1962. Whereas Barthes’s theoretical essay
concluding Mythologies, ‘myth Today’, had concentrated on Saussurian
notions of the sign, nowhere did it look at the ‘paradigmatic’, or
‘differential’, dimension of signs (83). Barthesian semiology (especially of
fashion) understood its object in systemic or ‘structural’ fashion but this
was a parallel, rather than a subsumable, effect of structural analyses.
This point is made obliquely by the left-wing critic Tom nairn in his review
of The Fashion System for The New Statesmen in 1967. For nairn,
The Fashion System is an ‘aberration’. not only did Barthes miss the
material, substantial reality of clothes within fashion—‘a fashion cannot
be born without being named’, nairn agreed with Barthes, but ‘it is not
born only by being named’; Barthes had also seemingly abandoned
his semiological analysis by swaying towards structuralism. Whereas
Barthes’s semiology had shown that meaning is relationship, his more
‘structuralist’ phase, argued nairn, was now insisting upon language as
‘separation, analysis’. Barthes’s structuralist approach in The Fashion
System, complained nairn, was operating ‘the sifting out of an elusive
reality from ambiguous appearances’; thus The Fashion System was
far too ‘formalist’ for nairn’s liking. as evidence of nairn’s and Calvet’s
critiques of Barthes’s mixing of structuralism into semiology, the preface
to The Fashion System suggested that Saussure’s belief that linguistics
was merely a branch of semiology, the general science of culture,