The Writings of Roland Barthes 139in mind this limit placed on ‘Zeitgeist’ theory, an overview of the distinctly
literary dimension to Barthes’s fashion theory in the 1960s may be useful
to determine questions of analogy and fashion form.
The 1960s, from clothes to
fashion; or: Fashion as
Literature
Fashion does not interest me. I don’t know what fashion is; what
interests me is style: they are two completely different things. Fashion
is something superficial, a regular change, dependent on tastes,
moods, which has nothing to do with real style. Style is the true result
that emerges from our times.
anDré CourrèGES (in Lemoine-Luccioni 1983)
Couture is for grannies.
BrIGITTE BarDoT (in Lobenthal 1990)
It was perhaps typical of the 1960s that it brought together a method
of fashion analysis based on the ‘shifter’ in language that Barthes
initiated, alongside the (now) classic 1960s fashionable dress called
the shift.^26 The 1960s were after all a decade of revolution in social
and political realities as well as in fashion. It was also the period when
Paris lost its worldwide fashion status as the ready-to-wear culture
began to challenge the elitism of haute couture (Lobenthal 1990: 41).
Whereas early 1950s fashion in France was estimated to be 85 per
cent handmade, by 1966 more than two-thirds was factory-made.^27
as Eric hobsbawm has recently suggested (2002: 261), it was not only
the collapse in 1965 in the number training to be priests that set the
1960s in France alight; it may also have been the moment when the
French clothing industry produced more trousers than skirts. With what
hobsbawm ironically calls the ‘forward march of jeans’ as the ‘significant
index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century’, Dior’s
1947 new Look was now up for challenge and parody. So alongside
andré Courrèges, the houses of ungaro, Cardin, Estérel, rabanne and
Saint Laurent all began to undermine the elitism of an outfit by Dior or