The Writings of Roland Barthes 149the body—sensuous/clothes—signifier (or ‘scientific’) opposition, to
produce the clothes—sensuous/body—signifier (or ‘poetic’) attitude to
clothing form and its function. Barthes’s formalism—tinged inevitably, if
parsimoniously, by an ideological critique—is perhaps more indebted to
hegelian formalism than we might have expected.
Interestingly, in one of his last comments on fashion—in a 1978
interview on the body, ‘Encore le corps’—Barthes now seemed happy
to accept hegel’s original assertion: ‘Clothing is the moment when the
sensuous becomes signifier, i.e. when clothing is that through which
the human body becomes signifier and thus a bearer of signs, of its
own signs even’ (Barthes 1995: 912–18).^40 So what seems to be
happening in his ongoing thoughts on the hegelian view of clothes, is
that, with different objects coming into Barthes’s sights (fashion, Erté’s
silhouetted alphabets, and then the body), he adopts and reshapes
hegel’s thoughts on clothing forms. It is perhaps glib then to see the
(apparent) heterogeneity of clothing forms that Barthes sees in 1978,
as La Croix does (1987: 75), as a sign of ‘postmodernity’: for Barthes
is, it would seem, merely ‘bending the stick’ towards heterogeneity as
he is (here) discussing the body (not fashion as such) or rather fashion’s
effect on the body; and were Barthes to discuss fashion per se in 1978,
doubtless he would be less convinced of this heterogeneity on a social
and systematic scale. So, given Jobling’s critique of Barthes’s work on
fashion as logocentrically anti-postmodern (see note 14 here) and de la
Croix’s view of Barthes as postmodern, we are merely reminded of how
irrelevant ‘postmodern’ theory is to understanding Barthes’s work on
fashion: the engagement with hegel clearly points to Barthes’s attempts
to found a modern if not modernist conception of clothing.
however, with cultural recuperation seemingly unstoppable in 1970s
France, Barthes appears, as we saw above, less than critical in his
account of couturiers and of the fashion political economy in general.
Indeed, Fortassier argues (1988: 215) that Barthes is one of the modern
sociologists of fashion who are happy to ‘excuse’ the fashion-conscious
woman who changes her wardrobe every season, by considering this
‘modern form of waste’ as a part of the ostentatious and ancient form
of human ‘potlatch’, in which appearance was considered magical,
and whose contemporary counterpart is found (in Barthes’s words)
in the ‘heavy wearing-effect of time’. Fortassier (216) points out that
for the semiologist—and Barthes is implicitly included in this—fashion