[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 75homogenous units. So all the notations which could imply any finality
other than meaning were removed from the inventory: such things as sales
advertising, even if they seemed to describe a Fashion and the technical
instructions for manufacture of the clothing (patterns). neither did we retain
make-up or hairstyle because, if these elements do indeed compete in
terms of Fashion, they are nevertheless not made of the same material as
clothing. There was still one formidable ambiguity: the occasions where
photographed (or drawn) clothing and then clothing commented upon in
a written text were mixed in the same magazine and often on the same
page. These two systems obviously do not have the same substance;
in one, it is looks, forms, surfaces, colours which count; in the other,
sentences and words; so we had to sacrifice one of the two structures
because in keeping both we could not hope to obtain homogenous
units; we decided to opt for the system of verbalized clothing because in
this system the verbal utterance of the Fashion signifieds constitutes an
irreplaceable methodological advantage. So no Fashion photography will
be treated,^24 and it is only the system of written Fashion clothing, provided
by articulated language, that is reconstituted here.^25
There are two ways of judging a piece of work: according to the project
itself or according to how the project has been carried out. If we still
have faith in the semiological project, we have nothing but doubts (and
often unpleasant certainties) about how well it has been fulfilled here.
It is not the dryness of this work, its abstraction, lack of ‘ideas’, its
apparent distance from the big ‘problems’ of the world, it is not even
the intuitive nature of certain purely empirical assertions which should
have only been made with a commutative analysis, for which this work
may be reproached.^26 on the contrary, it is its timidness in the face of
formalism and its impotence in the face of the system; for, on the one
hand, we were not able to avoid a certain number of subtle detours
around substantialism, for example often giving a crypto-psychological
description to the variants,^27 such is the inveterate naturalism in us; but
against this, we did not know how, at many moments, to ‘establish’
elegantly (in the mathematical sense of the term) the system (or even
how to tie it up or put it together),^28 leaving behind both ‘holes’ and
assemblages which are perhaps useless;^29 some important theoretical
points (for example the binary nature of oppositions) have not been
cleared up; the belief upon which this work sits, that language is not