‘Blue is in Fashion This Year’ 53and the vertical axis, as they layer themselves on top of each other in
thickness and in height. I have decided to call the vertical superposing
of items ‘strata’ (e.g. hat, scarf, jacket, skirt, shoes), and their horizontal
superposing ‘layers’ (e.g. for men, vest, shirt, jacket, coat). of course, the
‘strata’ have a much greater semantic importance than the ‘joins’ because
semiology by definition is interested in the visible. The problem becomes
complicated when, firstly, certain joins are partially visible (the collar part of
the shirt); and secondly when the joins are not stable (which shows how
necessary it is to distinguish the article from the item): a jacket can be an
external or an internal item (under a coat). however, an item is defined
entirely by the stratum (point of support) to which it belongs, and by the
join of which it is a part (internal, external, mixed).
19 [Editors’ note: ‘car coat’ is a woman’s coat worn in the 1950s in the car in
France, across the shoulders, rather like a trench coat. We are grateful to
Bruno remaury for this clarification.]
20 The signifieds probably organize themselves into the main functions of the
following type: town/country, smart/sporty, daytime/evening, etc.
21 of course, fashion must always be understood in its temporal sense:
blazer spring, this year.
22 In a more restricted sense a ‘psychological’ signified can itself be a link for
a circumstantial signified, such as coat travel, via the intermediary of the
signified: comfortable.
23 robert Blanché, Introduction à logique contemporaine, Paris, a. Colin,
1950, p.138.
24 In between a strict synchrony (fashion over one year) and a wide
diachrony, as studied by richardson and Kroeber, there is space for
a micro-diachrony which would try to structure the variations of one
‘vesteme’ over several years; for example, skirt length. This micro-
diachrony is possible because fashion signifiers depend on rules and not
on usage (the opposite of language).
25 I repeat: I have treated types of ‘vestemes’, not ‘vestemes’ themselves,
the inventory for which needs a systematic analysis.
26 If it is true that a fashion line comes from treating a certain number
of ‘vestemes’, then it is close, in cybernetic terms, to the machine as
idea, ‘a long calculation on a series of different operations (phonemes)’
(mandelbrot, Logique, langage et théorie de l’information, Paris, PuF,
1957, p. 44) [mandelbrot asks us to consider the very limited number
of operations in a machine as its ‘phonemes’, and the long calculation
it is asked to do as an idea; thus the phonemes must represent, slowly,
the ‘idea’ that they are to communicate. It is clearly useful for Barthes to
see this linguistic analogy being used in another science, here logic and
cybernetics].