154 The Language of Fashion
17 Propp described the ‘two-fold quality of a tale’ thus: ‘Its amazing
multiformity, picturesqueness, and colour, and on the other hand, its no
less striking uniformity, its repetition’ (2000 [1928]: 20–1).
18 I disagree with moeran (2004: 37) when he suggests that to concentrate
on the signifiers of fashion, as Barthes does in The Fashion System,
is to ignore taste. Surely Barthes’s point about written fashion being
the only aspect of fashion that has no practical or aesthetic function is
a fairly straightforward one: no worn fashion item (to my knowledge)
actually displays its written commentary (though it would be an interesting
experiment). In other words, the garment-wearer has no guarantee of
fashionable status in the eyes of the other. and this is precisely what
Barthes wanted to underline: namely, that fashion, like literature, cannot
survive without a written discourse—albeit found elsewhere, i.e. in fashion
magazines for the former and in literary criticism for the latter. The other
who then perceives the worn garment as fashionable is then beholden to
current definitions of ‘taste’, found in written fashion, as if the garment-
wearer were ‘winking’ this written ‘guarantee’ to them.
19 We must remember that Barthes is writing on class ‘distinction’ long
before Pierre Bourdieu’s magnum opus on the subject (1984 [1979]); and,
interestingly, Bourdieu pays scant regard to fashion in his social critique of
judgement and taste, preferring a more statistical analysis of clothing and
make-up habits.
20 no one has noted (to my knowledge) the affinity between Barthes’s
thoughts on clothing and signification to those of marx in Capital vol.1.
Barthes’s choice of the coat as his example repeats marx’s discussion
of the coat in relation to linen and labour in an uncanny way; see the
discussion of the coat in Capital vol. 1, (138–63, and especially 143)
where marx states: ‘[W]ithin its value-relation to linen, the coat signifies
more than it does outside it.. .’. Indeed, Barthes’s three choices of
object for his semiological studies in the early 1960s—food, clothing and
shelter—are distinctly marxian in their fundamental role within human
society.
21 another would be the idea of the combination. If the 1960s was the
decade of parody in fashion terms, where the ‘dialectic of fashion’ ruled
(Lobenthal 1990: 245), then for Barthesian fashion theory this was an
excellent example of the dialectic of the ‘semelfactive’ form (once-only,
truly original) versus its repetitive, recycling in different combinations—what
Gilles Deleuze called, in good nietzschean fashion, ‘difference and
repetition’ (1968).
22 The ‘Eleatic school’, founded around 540 bc at Elea by Xenophanes with
Parmenides and Zeno, held to a monist, monotheist materialism, which,
using reason rather than the senses, denied plurality and change in the
universe.