146 The Language of Fashion
Change and other journals were taking in the aftermath of may 1968.^38
In the 1971 interview with Stephen heath, Barthes therefore argued the
following with regard to semiology and its success in education: ‘once
an institution becomes involved, one can say that there is recuperation’
(1985b: 130), and he blamed the scientific version of semiology for this.
however, as always with Barthes, things are never straightforward. Just
as ‘interpretation’ seemed to return to his analysis of fashion forms in
the post-1968 period, his 1971 comments on fashion designers now
appeared far from critical.
Discussing the stylish alphabet designed by Erté and reminding the
reader that the Italian artist was originally a fashion designer, Barthes asked
rhetorically: ‘are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from
strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?’ (1986: 113).
For like poetry or literature, a fashion form cannot be ‘explained’: ‘Each
time Fashion notably changes (for instance, shifting from long to short),
we find reporters eagerly questioning the psychologists and sociologists
to discover what new Woman will be generated by the miniskirt or the
sack. a waste of time as it turns out: no one can answer’. For Barthes
now in 1971, acutely aware (as we saw above) of the ‘recuperation’
operated by post-1968 cultural systems, ‘no discourse can be based
on Fashion, once it is taken as the symbolic expression of the body’.
Therefore, in that fashion cannot ‘traverse, develop, describe its symbolic
capacity’, it ‘seeks clarity, not pleasure’; it is ‘not obsessed by the body’
but by ‘the Letter, the body’s inscription in a systematic space of signs’,
that is ‘the general sign-system which makes our world intelligible to us,
i.e. liveable’ (114–15). So again, Barthes seemed to be swinging back
to a non-interpretative fashion theory. It was also, as he acknowledged,
a challenge to a certain orthodoxy set up by hegel (which Barthes had
happily cited in The Fashion System, chapter 18.11), and a discussion of
which we must now engage in for the conclusion of this afterword.
Barthes articulates his critique of hegel by way of the silhouette in
Erté’s drawings of women in his alphabet: ‘hegel has noted that the
garment is responsible for the transition from the sensuous (the body)
to the signifier; the Ertéan silhouette (infinitely more thought out than the
fashion mannequin) performs the contrary movement (which is more
rare): it makes the garment sensuous and the body into the signifier;
the body is there (signed by the silhouette) in order for the garment
to exist; it is not possible to conceive a garment without the body.. .’