140 The Language of Fashion
Chanel. as Courrèges himself put it, ‘I’m the Ferrari, Chanel the old
rolls, still in working order but inert’ (cited in madsen 1990: 300).^28 and
in the 1960s Chanel was simply ‘subtly reworking the same styles’ (de
la haye/Tobin 1994: 105), and Courrèges’s very mode of presentation,
let alone his outfits, was ‘diametrically opposed to the couture status
quo’ (Lobenthal 1990: 50).
Barthes seemed to side with the modern designers such as
Courrèges in his 1967 Marie Claire article on the ‘Chanel versus
Courrèges’ duel and was the first to suggest, according to vincent-
ricard (1987: 80), that 1960s youth ‘no longer needs to be either vulgar
or distinguished, it simply is’. Barthes is even credited with helping
Courrèges’s sales; valérie Guillaume (1998: 4) wonders if Barthes’s
piece in Marie Claire did not show those women fond of Chanel’s
timeless chic how to wear Courrèges’s ‘new’ look. however, it is the
fundamentally literary way in which Barthes inserted himself into the
fashion debates of the 1960s that was perhaps his key success.
michel Butor (1974: 384) suggests that the only reason Barthes
looked at the written language of women’s fashion was that women’s
language was taboo for men, which Barthes could then break with
his pseudo-scientific language of semiology. In fact, Butor concluded,
the way for The Fashion System to ward off any scientific criticism
of its method was to make itself into a book of literature (385).^29 The
distinctly literary take is unmistakeable in Barthes’s analyses of fashion
forms. Indeed, there was in Barthes’s thought on clothing, as we saw,
a clear move towards its ‘literarization’, in both senses of the word.
across the period covered in this anthology, it is clearly language which
becomes his dominant mode of enquiry and explanation. But also,
Barthes seems to allow Fashion and Literature to dovetail in a number
of key ways.
In 1959 (see Chapter 2 here) Barthes possibly realized that his project
on the history of clothing forms was far too large and perhaps ultimately
futile (to use one of his regular expressions in relation to clothing
histories), leading him to devise, instead, a synchronic study of fashion.
however, it could also lead us to conclude that the move towards a
literarization of fashion was dependent on the semiological turn that
Barthes’s thought had taken since 1956. Furthermore, this literarization
of sociological thought would necessarily draw on literature, the literary,
because the writing alongside images of fashionable outfits in fashion