148 The Language of Fashion
of the body in their delicate and flowing development but stretched-out
sacks with stiff folds’ (746). ancient Greek clothing as displayed in the
art of antiquity, by contrast, argues hegel, ‘is a more or less explicitly
formless surface.. ., [it] remains plastic and simply hangs down freely in
accordance with its own immanent weight’. ‘What constitutes the ideal
in clothing’ suggests hegel then, ‘is the determining principle displayed
when the outer wholly and entirely subserves the changeable expression
of spirit appearing in the body’ (164). In other (Barthesian) words, the
body in hegelian thought ought to have a formless clothing covering it,
a covering in which the body is the signifier and the latter ‘adapted to
precisely [the] pose or movement momentarily only’ of the body wearing
it. This is a dialectical (rather than strictly semiological) understanding
of clothing as formless, infinitely changeable in line with the flux of the
shape of the body as signifier. Indeed, hegel’s reasoning may be far
different from Barthes’s—‘Such clothing is in fact just a covering and
a veil which throughout lacks any form of its own, but, in the organic
formation of the limbs which it follows in general, precisely conceals
what is visibly beautiful, namely their living swelling and curving, and
substitutes for them the visible appearance of a material mechanically
fashioned’; but Barthes’s suggestion that couturiers should be seen
as ‘poets’ echoes perfectly the ‘artistic’ that hegel is looking for in
clothing, albeit in its sculptural representation. Furthermore, Barthes’s
claim that ‘It is not possible to conceive a garment without the body’
is precisely what hegel seems to be saying in seeing the ideal clothing
as ‘formless’. In other words, clothing for hegel—and it seems also for
Barthes (by 1971 at least)—should show (or signify) the body in its all
its sensuousness, a sensuousness which is signified by the very clothes
worn. unless we fall back on to nudity and its beauty as a desired form,
it is the literal nature of clothing that unites Barthes and hegel in their
conception of appropriate clothing forms (hegel’s ‘artistic’ clothes would
be those worn by ancient Greeks, but Barthes does not pronounce
on any preferred forms). ‘our manner of dress, as outer covering’,
concludes hegel, ‘is insufficiently marked out by our inner life to appear
conversely as shaped from within’ (166). The key point then is that
hegelian clothing theory anticipates—though, in good deconstructive
fashion, it is only by reading Barthes’s theories on the matter that we can
see this—the modern, anti-psychological and deeply functionalist view
of clothes often adopted by Barthes’s fashion theory. This view inverts