The Language of Fashion

The Writings of Roland Barthes 127

should be inverted: semiology, Barthes hinted in 1967, was merely a
branch of linguistics, linguistics being not just a model of meaning in
human society but the fundamental basis of human society. This is a
crucial moment in the confusion of semiology with structuralism, indeed
of the subsuming of semiology into a differential and paradigmatic form
of analysis known as structuralism. Crucial in inspiring Barthes’s more
formalist and structuralist activity of the mid-1960s was the publication
in France of Jakobson’s Essais de linguistique générale in 1963 and
Tzvetan Todorov’s edited anthology of russian formalism, Théorie de
la littérature in 1965, both of which crystallized a more ‘differential’
structuralist phase of Barthes’s work, and which is found (to nairn’s
dismay) in The Fashion System.
Therefore Barthes’s strictly ‘structuralist’ phase proper began
somewhere between 1960 (with the work on racine) and 1964, and
therefore his pivotal decision in 1959 to look at the language of fashion
(rather than clothing history) was based on other factors. moreover,
it has not been insisted upon enough that the total disregard for
worn clothing, in favour of written (or verbalized, ‘represented’) and
illustrated clothing forms, is a fine example of Barthes’s interest in the
image/text interface. although Jakobson is not mentioned in Barthes’s
1961 article ‘The Photographic message’ (Sontag 1982: 194–210),
in which the relationship between text and image is a central part of
the analysis, Barthes was already anticipating Jakobson’s notion of
the shifter (see Jakobson 1990: 386–92).^13 It was the shifter (‘look’,
‘here we have’, ‘there’, etc.) that is the crucial ‘clutch’—to borrow
Jakobson’s metaphor, hijacked and redeployed by Barthes according
to Calvet (1973: 91)—which smoothes the passage between written
text and image; it is a part of speech that will be central to Barthes’s
subsequent work on the written, ‘represented’ fashion in The Fashion
System (Barthes 1985a: 6).^14
‘Language and Clothing’ (Chapter 2 here) then becomes a pivotal text,
before his structuralist activity proper, in the move from studying clothing
history to looking at contemporary fashion. Perhaps not surprisingly,
given the success of Mythologies in 1957, Barthes was quick in the
article’s conclusion to make the link between fashion and mythology.
But this comes at the end of an important discussion where he seemed
to abandon the study of clothes and the history of their forms. Does
Barthes decide to move from clothing to fashion—as we see at the end