152 The Language of Fashion
costume, which continues to concentrate on fashion for the privileged few’
(dust cover).
4 See Greimas, La mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire
vestimentaire d’après les journaux de mode de l’époque, and Quelques
reflets de la vie sociale en 1830 dans le vocabulaire des journaux de mode
de l’époque, thesis and second thesis (1948) for a ‘doctorat-ès-lettres’
at the Faculté des Lettres de l’université de Paris. These theses have
recently been republished (Greimas 2000).
5 ‘L’actualité du saussurisme’, Le Français Moderne 24 (1956), 191–203
(republished in Greimas 2000 : 371–82). unfortunately none of the early
Greimas work has been translated, only those writings from 1962 onwards
that cover his work on narrative structures are available in English; see
Greimas, On Meaning. Selected Writings on Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul
Perron and Frank Collins, London, Frances Pinter, 1987.
6 as Greimas himself had done, Barthes’s Mythologies repeated the
misrecognition of hjelmslev’s ‘meta-language’ as the language of
connotation, (see arrivé in Greimas 2000: xix). arrivé underlines how much
Greimas’s two theses needed to use Saussure’s theories much earlier in
his doctoral work (xiii); and yet, Greimas’s decision to work on the year
1829–1830 made his analysis deeply synchronic, and, though clearly not
about development, it clearly invites a historical reading if one then looks
at the same vocabulary before and after the period studied.
7 however, the clearest and most specific influence from Greimas is the
choice and method of clothes and fashion (not to mention the 1830
date for Balzac’s Sarrasine), for it is the language of 1830 (and the use
of vladimir Propp’s theories which are central to Greimas’s work in the
1960s) that permeates Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s gothic story in S/Z.
8 Indeed, it might not be too far-fetched to consider Barthes’s work on
fashion as a continuation of Kroeber’s search for a formal law of fashion
forms, especially given that Kroeber’s own time-line for fashion cycles
(anywhere from 75 to 125 years) goes beyond the lifespan of any
one human individual. and here Barthes’s fascination with michelet’s
historiography was a fundamental influence—how to stand within, and
simultaneously outside, history.
9 There is a debt also, as I have suggested elsewhere (Stafford 1998: 26–8),
to Trotsky’s ‘long’ view of the rise of capitalism.
10 Perrot writes: ‘yet though we have many histories of dress, it is difficult to
find systematic connections between dress styles and the chronology of
politics. Changes of regime, ideological upheavals, and transformations
in mores sometimes superficially influence the pace and content of
fashion, but these variations take place within slow oscillations’, and, he
adds, ‘analogous to the deeper tendencies that economists perceive
beneath rapid day-to-day price movements. The regular evolution of these