138 The Language of Fashion
rigour. This is despite the fact that, later on, Lefebvre seems to side with
Barthes against martinet in seeing the most powerful form of human
acts of communication as semiological, rather than simply linguistic as
the pure linguisticians such as martinet would have it (316). It is clear,
then, that at a micro semiological level, as well as at a macro political
one, the relationship of history to structure is a complex one and not
easily resolved.
The discussion as to the relationship between history and structure
raises the question of analogy and its appropriateness. Is it analogical
(even homological) to use linguistics (in Barthes’s case) to explain
fashion? I have argued elsewhere that Barthes was suspicious of
analogy, especially in relation to historiography, in its tendency to ignore
specificity (Stafford 1998: Chapter 2). But is applying linguistics to fashion
a form of analogy?^24 moriarty points out (1991: 76) that in his work on
food, clothes and shelter, Barthes was aware that the langue/parole
relationship was not identical: in fashion for example, individuals cannot
act back on the system in the same way that they can in language as it
is spoken. It is clear that, though Barthes is very wary of linking clothing
form directly to history—and explicitly so at regular moments in his work
on fashion, making sharp differences with Lefebvre in the round-table
discussion in this book—he nevertheless mobilizes historical society and
societies to explain the function of various substances and phenomena
in clothing. For example, his is a deeply historicist explanation of the
disappearance of dandyism. Fashion, he argues, ‘killed off’ this distinctly
nineteenth-century phenomenon when the manufactured uniformity
of type allowed for the infinite variety of detail. Similarly, gemstones,
once part of prehistoric society, became jewellery in modern society.
With regard to historical influence, the question then becomes, what
constitutes ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’? Without the caveats of a Kroeber,
there is a danger, especially with regard to a radical decade such as
the 1960s, that we infer directly from history the forms that fashion
takes. This is not to say that Barthes dismisses history as an important
category—and some of his comments on historical influence on clothing
forms come surprisingly close to some of those by James Laver (see
Carter 2003: 127); but his is a structural use of history, not a ‘Zeitgeist’
one. and though sensitive to Flügel’s work, which tries to place historically
defined social mores on to fashion changes (Carter 113), Barthes is
distinctly more Kroeberian in his historical formalism.^25 So, whilst bearing