History and Sociology of Clothing 15Notes
1 Published in Annales 3 (July–Sept.) 1957, 430–41; Oeuvres complètes
vol. 1, 741–51.
2 a list of these investigations (by century) can be found in rené Colas,
Bibliographie générale du costume et de la mode, Paris, Librairie
Colas, 1932–1933, 2 vol. (t. 11, p. 1412) and in Camille Enlart, Manuel
d’archéologie française, Paris, Picard, 1916 (t. III [‘Le costume’],
pp. xxi–xxix, including descriptions of each of the studies).
3 Jules Etienne Joseph Quicherat, Histoire du costume en France [depuis les
temps les plus reculés jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle], Paris, hachette, 1875,
III–680p. Camille Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française, Paris, Picard,
- Germain Demay, Le Costume au moyen age, d’après les sceaux,
Paris, Dumoulin et cie, 1880 [with chapters on the outfits of kings and
queens, of women, of knights and horses, of sailors, huntsmen and the
clergy, as displayed on elaborate seals dating back to the middle ages].
4 The best drawings, because overtly schematic, are those by nevil Truman,
Historic Costuming, London, Pitman, 1936.
5 The history of language is not very helpful here; not only can a garment
change its name without changing function, but, conversely, it can change
function without a change of name. In any case, the lexicology of clothes
is still very fragmentary (see Greimas, La Mode en 1830.. ., typed thesis,
1948 [republished in Greimas 2000] and Eva rodhe Lundquist, La Mode
et son vocabulaire [Quelques termes de la mode féminine au moyen âge
suivis dans leur évolution sémantique, thesis], Göteborg, Wettergren &
Kerber 1950, 190 p. [Editors’ note: seeing language as linked to social
and political change, Lundquist describes the semantic changes in fashion
as ‘capricious’ (171)].
6 There would be a case for listing all the changes in how a garment is
worn. We might find a law that says that a garment is always pushed from
the inside to the outside; only psychoanalysts have treated this question
so far.
7 andré varagnac, Définition du folklore, Paris, Société d’éditions
géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1938, p. 21. [Editors’ note:
varagnac says that national folklore is ‘rare’, rather than Barthes’s ‘never’.]
8 The birth of vestimentary deception, at the end of the fifteenth century,
can be understood only if it is linked organically to an ideological
transformation in the function of social ‘appearances’. Quicherat himself
(Histoire du costume, p. 330) did not hesitate in linking this with the birth
of capitalism; but this type of observation is very rare.
9 Lucien Febvre, ‘Le problème des divisions en histoire’, in Bulletin du
Centre International de Synthèse Historique, no. 2 December 1926,