The Writings of Roland Barthes 143when the ‘language of fashion’ was foremost in his mind: ‘Forms resist,
or worse still, they do not change at the same rate’ (1992 [1963]: 154).
here is the paradox in Barthes’s theory then, something that remains
constant throughout his critique of histories of fashion: that history and
form are not at all directly linked—and a study such as that by van
Thienen (1961), which takes clothing as a direct peel-off from historical
events, would be anathema to a Barthes trying to explain clothing
forms internally. But then again, literature is, as we have seen, clearly
an analogical horizon for Barthes working on fashion.^33 So form (and
the changes in form) cannot simply be inferred by historical changes;
and yet theories on how form relates to history can be applied across
phenomena (here, from fashion to literature, and then back): Barthes’s
theory of form therefore needs a level of analogy in which history plays
a paradoxical role. This has important consequences for the question of
form, interpretation and politics (and their very interrelation) in Barthes’s
fashion theory. We are now in a position to come to some tentative
conclusions on the radical-interpretative and scientific-formalist tensions
in Barthes’s writing on fashion.
Conclusion: Back to
interpretation?
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
oSCar WILDE
Fashion is nothing but what one says it is.
roLanD BarThES (1972 [1961])
It is not easy to say whether clothes really are part of human primal
character but they are certainly ‘semantic engines’ (to quote Daniel
Dennett). and perhaps one of Barthes’s enduring (and distinctly
humanist) notions within fashion theory is the idea that as consumers we
verbalize, constantly and continually, our relationship to clothing forms.
however, this is only a formal explanation of fashion and clothing. What
about its content? That ‘fashion is structured on the level of its history’,
may be incontestable in Barthes’s work; but, he also argued, in the