134 The Language of Fashion
clothing item. here semiology is the key method of inquiry, trumping
all other disciplines. But as a dialectical form of enquiry—and this is a
very dialectical time for Barthes and other critics using semiology—it
cannot criticize itself from without: it is from within that it must provide
its own auto-critique, a summary of its own shortcomings. It is here
that semiology outstrips and inflects structuralism towards post-
structuralism, towards changing itself into semiotics.
however, despite the very clear move away from sociology at the
start of Barthes’s ‘high-structuralist’ phase between 1963 and 1967,
there is much that is still deeply sociological about his writing on
clothing. Though The Fashion System is almost exclusively concerned
with bourgeois (or perhaps, more likely, petty bourgeois) fashion
forms and ideology, there are still hints of a wider, class-inflected
consciousness at work. In addition to the sociological comments in
The Fashion System on work and ‘endimanchement’ for the popular
masses (see Chapters 18.4 and 18.7), Barthes’s 1961 piece on
gemstones and jewellery (Chapter 5 here) suggested an important
sociological point about access to fashion. The ‘detail’ seemed to be
for Barthes an excellent example of how modern mass fashion was
experiencing what we now tend to call a social ‘levelling-up’. Just as
the place where one shops for groceries in today’s world is no longer
a sign of one’s social status, so access to fashion can be opened up
by the addition of the smallest (and cheapest) of details which affect
the overall fashion form adopted (Barthes’s example being cheap,
affordable jewellery). This ‘democratization’ of fashion is accompanied,
he suggests, by a secularization of jewellery in which (and this clearly
implies a socioeconomic dimension) cheaper materials such as wood,
metal and glass can easily (and even preferably) stand in for their rare
and priceless originals. Behind this attention to detail is Barthes’s
critique of the simili, what he had considered in Mythologies as petty
bourgeois ideology’s way of offering the poor and working population
at least a copy of wealth and style and thereby a dream of social
climbing. however, by 1962, this ‘levelling-up’ was not so much the
embourgeoisement of the masses denounced in Mythologies, but a
rather spurious guarantee of ‘taste’.^18 Barthes did not explore the class
connotations of this ideological function but it nevertheless has clear
class connotations when considered alongside ‘distinction’ and the
dandy’s elitist desires.^19 In fact, Barthes’s constant inability to get away