[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 77however this debate over whether clothing signifies or not does not
appear in the final book version.]
9 Fashion was from a very early stage (following herbert Spencer) a central
sociological object; firstly, it was ‘a collective phenomenon, a typical
mass phenomenon’ (Stoetzel, La Psychologie sociale, Paris, Flammarion,
1963, 245). Secondly, it presented a dialectic of conformity and change
which is explicable only sociologically; finally, its dissemination seems to
depend upon those relay systems (with opinion leaders [Lazarsfeld’s term]
in between) which the sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz have
studied [see Personal Influence. The Part Played by People in the Flow
of Mass Communications, report of Bureau of applied Social research,
Columbia university, ny, Free Press, 1964, especially chapter XI ‘Fashion
Leaders’, 247–70; see also The Fashion System, 9 n. 19] (Decatur [in
the state of Illinois where Katz and Lazarsfeld carried out their research
for Personal Influence], see also Lazarsfeld and raymond Boudon, Le
Vocabulaire des sciences sociales, Paris/hague, mouton, 1965; and Paul
Lazarsfeld, hazel Gaudet, Bernard Berelson, The People’s Choice, new
york, Columbia university Press, 1948).
10 [See the work of Gilles-Gaston] Granger.
11 To this criterion certain authors add in a supplementary requirement,
a double articulation (Georges mounin [‘Les analyses sémantiques’, in
Cahiers de l’Institut de science économique appliquée, march 1962, no.
123 (série m, no. 13), 105–24, where mounin’s main point is to stress that,
though semantic analysis has been wisely applied to other disciplines such
as sociology, anthropology, archaeology and psychology, it needs to be
defined more carefully; in this vein, mounin applauds the use of semantics
in Barthes’s Mythologies as a sociological and analytical tool, but he
then regrets that ‘sign’, ‘semantics’ and ‘semiology’ are used by Barthes
in the final essay ‘myth, Today’ in their linguistic sense, only then to be
‘confused’, says mounin, with the idea of ‘symbol’ as it is used in logic,
psychology and psychoanalysis; this confusion, suggests mounin, inhibits
the interdisciplinary approach that Barthes tries to take in explaining myth
(see p. 108 n. 6); see also the Fashion System 13.7 (197, on ‘primitives’
in language)] and andré martinet) [see Elements of Semiology 39, for
Barthes’s definition of double articulation].
12 [See the definition of clothing as language in] hegel, Balzac, michelet, Poe,
Baudelaire, Proust.
13 ‘Structural linguistics does not do away with non-linguistic languages...
It is through the study of non-linguistic languages and by a comparison
of these with linguistic languages that we will discover the differentia
specifica of linguistic language.’ (Louis hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques,
Copenhagen, nordisk Sprog og Kulturforlag, 1959, in the Copenhagen
Linguistic Circle series vol. 12, no. 14, p. 25).