The Writings of Roland Barthes 151is conceived by Barthes implies a much more voluntaristic (not passive)
dimension to signification and to those values placed on clothing forms
(Carter 2003: 155–56). This essay has shown, I hope, that these two
conceptions of fashion—as ‘constraint’ and as ‘appropriation’—do not
(necessarily) stand in opposition to each other, as Stern (2004: 2) seems
to imply, but sit, as they do in Barthes’s own work, in a tension.
Is it too ‘liberal’ then to allow this tension to be a signifier of a much
wider set of problems—encapsulated in the various contradictions that
we have discussed here? Is this tension tantamount to seeing fashion
as a form of (paradoxically) mass avant-garde cultural praxis? Then
again, it is all very well to pronounce this oxymoron, indicative of a
highly innovative creativity by the masses within the social ‘institution’
of fashion forms; but what about the mathematical reality of this, the
mass ideology, the dialectically multipliable ‘double-consciousness’
of the individual? In other words, have we really got past the radical
marxian idea which sees advertising—fashion being one amongst many
of its forms—as alienated and alienating? Is commodity fetishism, as
postmodern theory would have it (Kohan 2005), now really an irrelevant
category in contemporary fashion theory? It is his cultural formalism—
the ability to sit ‘inside’ people’s minds as they commune with the
garment, and at the same time the ability to stand outside and point
to fashion’s nakedness before human justice and equality—that makes
Barthes, ultimately, into a conciliatory theorist, dialectically arbitrating
(or vacillating) between opposing camps, but never abandoning either
position definitively: Barthes, particoloured like the jester of the middle
ages, both fool and wise man, both inside and outside of fashion, the
dandy of modern ideas.
Notes
1 Exceptions to this (other than Carter 2003) include Culler 1975, Lavers
1982, moriarty 1991 and Sheringham 2005, which we will discuss during
this essay.
2 Sheringham even includes Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel in this
‘positive’ camp (2005: 306–12).
3 Indeed, up until recently, as Diana de marly points out (1986), working
dress has ‘seldom received the attention it deserves in histories of