xiv Preface
Interpretations, sees him deploying his essayistic skill and research
results in a number of different forums. ‘The Contest between Chanel
and Courrèges’, appearing in the women’s magazine Marie Claire
in 1967, and subtitled by the magazine ‘refereed by a Philosopher’,
concerns a specific ‘battle’ (as Barthes saw it) taking place in the
French fashion industry. Though not a philosopher, Barthes shows
himself a consummate essayist as he ‘interprets’ the meanings behind
Chanel’s different ranges, how little these have actually changed, how
the worn and the durable in Chanel stand in opposition to the new,
future-oriented offerings of Courrèges. There was thus a ‘duel’ taking
place in French fashion of the mid-1960s, Barthes was suggesting,
between classicism and modernism. The article also differentiates
the conception of the body in the respective fashion houses. Finally,
Barthes suggests the importance of this battle: on the same level as
literature, film and music, Fashion—as a form of ‘taste’—both reflects
and inflects people’s way of thinking and represents a form of historical
and sociological ‘mentality’. Then, in the wake of may 1968, the
moment of intense radicalization in French student and class politics
that had been slowly building since 1962, Barthes is suddenly acerbic
in his criticism of hippy fashion. ‘a Case of Cultural Criticism’, written
from morocco in 1969 for the cultural theory journal Communications,
is perhaps an important one for those critics (such as rose Fortassier
or rick rylance) who suggest that Barthes simply ignored the parole
side of clothing in his rush to see fashion as constructed solely as a
langue. It is a sharp (and again essayistic) ‘reading’ of hippy fashion and
counter-cultural practice as witnessed by Barthes in morocco, which
considers hippy clothing as both deeply critical of, and compromised
by, Western cultural hegemony. Without any contact with political
critique, cultural critique such as that performed by hippy fashion is,
he concludes, unable to escape being a kind of inverted bourgeois
form. Finally, ‘Showing how rhetoric Works’, published in a special
number on ‘Fashion and Invention’ of the radical journal Change (and
not included in Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes), is a selection of key
quotes from The Fashion System. It covers in particular elements of
the ‘rhetoric’ section which are republished as fragments and edited
in the light of the may 1968 events. It is a useful summary of Barthes’s
critique of the ‘rhetoric’ of fashion, but also indicative of his influence on
the fashion debate following may 1968.