142 The Language of Fashion
perception, if you change the level of perception, you end up changing
the object’ (1985b: 135).^31
already in a 1967 interview (1994: 458), again speaking of literary
study in a way that could be applied to his analysis of fashion, Barthes
opined: ‘It is linguistics that has allowed us to avoid the impasse
which sociologism and historicism brings us to, and which consists
of excessively reducing history to the history of referents’, thereby
ignoring, he added (in deference to Braudel’s multiple dimensions of
history) the ‘plural’ aspect of historical moments. It was the signifier—
not the possible signifieds that it generated—that needed to be
privileged in the new post-1968 world. Indeed, written in the wake of
may 1968, the opening paragraphs of S/Z are exemplary in showing
how the human sciences, writing, the literary, now needed to escape
the overarching, all-defining, totalizing systems of structuralism, to (re)
discover both the singular and its infinite possibilities of combination.^32
It is for this reason, in part, that we decided to include in this anthology
the ‘Showing how rhetoric Works’ article (which appeared in Change
in 1969), even though it is clear that this piece is not ‘original’, rather a
collection of (slightly edited) fragments from The Fashion System which
had appeared two years before. For what is interesting about these
collected fragments from The Fashion System is precisely their own
‘recombination’ (or combinatoire): whether it was Barthes himself or the
editors of this special number of the journal on fashion who selected
choice moments of his magisterial analysis of the rhetoric of the fashion
system, the selection made is indicative of the journal’s radical take on
fashion, a radical moment in fashion theory to which we will return in a
moment.
Seeing Literature in Fashion, or Fashion as Literature, was an
important element of Barthesian fashion theory, modelling the way
in which it looked at the influence or otherwise of history on form. To
literarize ‘fashion’, to equate the world of fashion with that of literature
was to formalize clothing and its attendant myths and means of
communication in order to dismantle the model. But literarization ran
the risk of being formalist and thereby of losing its political charge and
its ideological critique.
It is not a coincidence that a (short) answer to what constitutes ‘direct’
and ‘indirect’ with regard to historical influence on fashion form comes
at the start of Barthes’s writing on racine in 1960, at the very moment