The Writings of Roland Barthes 135from socioeconomic (or sociological) issues within fashion are clearly
marked in his 1967 essay on Courrèges and Chanel, and even more
so in his critique of hippy fashion (of which more below). Crucially, this
linked back to the relationship between agency and institution: how
much the self ‘buys into’ a system, and the rhetorical devices that the
system uses to invite such a ‘buying-in’.
History/structure clothes/fashion?
Barthes, as always, seems a little lost between linguisticians who
have very little to say for his semiology and historicists who berate
his structuralism. and yet, the functionalism of his analyses has
drawn applause. Luis Prieto considered Barthes’s main contribution
to semiology to be the ‘function-sign’, in which ‘the utilitarian object
is converted into a sign’ (moriarty 1991: 78), an example being the
raincoat (Barthes 1968: 41–2), which keeps the rain off but which is also
a sign of rain, to the extent that there can be ‘raincoats’ in fashion which
do not even keep out the rain.^20 This was nevertheless an important
development. Barthes’s functionalism went back to his first article on
clothing in 1957 (Chapter 1 here). The example of the roman penula
that he gave in ‘history and Sociology of Clothing’ in 1957 was a clear
break with the three-fold ‘motivational’ view of clothing. however, there
does seem to be a further, or different, shift when he considered the
raincoat in a similar way. For how would this functional analysis apply
to the roman penula? Would it be a sign of Romanness? or would
this interpretation be to place modern sign-systems anachronistically
on to pre-modern phenomena? must the semiology of fashion itself
be synchronous in its insistence upon a synchrony of analysis? This
is perhaps a good example of the history/structure dilemma: how do
change and order relate to each other, across the human sciences
and, as we shall see, the natural sciences?^21 on the level of Barthes’s
object—fashion—the dilemma is seen by him to be resolved (see The
Fashion System, 20.12); but on the level of analysis, how history relates
to structure is a complex question.
Given that Lévi-Strauss was acutely aware of the anti-historical
claims made against structuralism (see Gaboriau in Lane 1970: 156–69)