The Writings of Roland Barthes 145Criticism’ was redolent of a general political climate on the Left at the
time.^35 This is despite the fact that Barthes’s critique of hippies has itself
been criticized for his own ‘orientalist’, stereotyping tendencies. Diana
Knight (1997: 129ff, 176) points out that the critique of an ‘ideologically
dubious parody of moroccan poverty’, in which Barthes contrasts the
Western hippy with the poor moroccan peasants’ true poverty, may be
weakened by Barthes’s own account of his search for a blue djellaba in
Incidents (written in morocco at the same time as the article on hippy
fashion). however, in my view, his critique of hippies’ economically poor
chic appears much less ironic when we consider other thoughts on
poverty in morocco. In ‘Brecht and Discourse: a Contribution to the
Study of Discursivity’ in 1975 (Barthes 1986: 212–22), in the section
called ‘The Sign’ (219–21), Barthes’s semiological and Brechtian
analysis of the policeman’s shoes (perfectly shined and in immaculate
condition) contrasts them with those worn by the destitute boy who is
being hassled off the beach by the policeman. It is the boy’s shoddy
shoes which are an indelible social marker, he argues with deep pathos,
revealing a Barthes acutely aware of the reality behind the ‘signs’ of
socioeconomic alienation.
But Barthes’s criticism of hippy fashion is also not just a gay writer
suspicious of young men in drag-like clothes, but primarily someone
unable to see social change coming from the hippies (signalled here
in his reflections on real poverty, or destitution). and implicitly Barthes
seems to see the (hippy) Bohemian as the ‘structural opposite’ of the
Dandy, echoing Georg Simmel’s critique of the Bohemian (see Carter
2003: 74). For Barthes is acutely sensitive to the radical post-1968
idea of ‘recuperation’, to the possibility that hippy fashion is merely
another example of what George melly called ‘revolt into style’ (1970).^36
here the special number of Change, in which the fragments from The
Fashion System were published in 1969, became part of the radical
critique of post-1968 French culture as one of ‘recuperation’. referring
to a piece by marx from an unpublished section of Capital that had
(apparently) been first published in Change a year before (no. 2, 1968),
this special number in 1969, called ‘Fashion—invention’, included this
quote from the German revolutionary: ‘Fashionable subversion is a
conservative subversion—an upside-down staging—which the effect of
development and discovery ironically engenders and then destroys’.^37
This (little-known) quote from marx was indicative of the radical tone that