156 The Language of Fashion
32 When Barthes speaks of the ‘detail’ as a crucial ornament operating on
the meaning of an outfit, we must not confuse this with ‘ornamentation’,
one of the three motivational categories that Barthes had discarded in
his explanation of clothing. The only point of continuity between pre-
and post-1968 in Barthes’s work seems to be the ‘detail’. The ‘detail’
becomes pivotal in his move from a rather heady, scientistic structuralism
to a more slippery and playful post-structuralism. ‘Detail’ also becomes,
in late 1960s France, an anti-technocratic, ‘scandalous’ element in critical
essayism.
33 at the same time as he is writing ‘Towards a Sociology of Dress’ and
‘“Blue is in Fashion This year”’, Barthes was also publishing his piece
‘history or Literature?’ (1992 [1963]). In it he applied his view (set out also
in Chapter 1 here) that there is a non-equivalence between clothing and
history to the theatre of racine and to literature in general: for literature too
is ‘at once a sign of history, and a resistance to this history’ (1992: 155).
34 This socially interpretative analysis of fashion forms recurs in Barthes’s
work right up until his death. The analysis of the Quaker origins of men’s
aristocratic fashion was useful in the very final ‘dossier’ of his life, on
nadar’s photographic portraits of the people in the world of Proust (2003:
394). here for Barthes the whole social dialectic of men’s clothing revolved
around distinction: monarchical outfits of the leisured classes versus the
democratic Quaker clothes adapted for workers.
35 In 1971 Barthes tells Stephen heath that he is close to Derrida in having
‘the feeling of participating (of wanting to participate) in a period of history
that nietzsche calls “nihilism”’ (1985b: 133)—a nihilism of which Punk
fashion would have been proud.
36 The number of Communications in which Barthes’s piece on hippies
appears is introduced by Edgar morin’s essay which takes ‘recuperation’
as its key theme in this new post-1968 world: ‘We are back to endemic
crisis and neo-recuperation’, argues morin (1969: 19), in which ‘Cultural
negativity (anomia, madness, auto-didacticism, radical critique) becomes
itself a positive form. Indeed conformism is obliged to integrate non-
conformism... Whether in the form of defusing, spiriting away or
integration, recuperation really is a vital process within the cultural
system... as soon as there is system there is recuperation’ (15).
Gaudibert (1971: 114–21) traces the theory of ‘recuperation’ back to the
writings of Benjamin, Pierre naville and Trotsky.
37 Karl marx in Change 4 (1969: 8), but not quoted from Change 2 (82–83)
as is claimed. The piece from marx’s Capital is ‘La métamorphose des
marchandises’, a section which had not been translated into French
from Capital vol. 1 (see Das Kapital, Berlin, Band/Dietz verlag, 1957,
109–10). The special number of Change on fashion then includes pieces
on fashion by Jean Paris, Claude ollier, Philippe Boyer, Paul Zumthor,