The Language of Fashion TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno Being and Event, Alain Badiou On Religion, Karl Barth The Language of Fashion, Roland Barthes The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard I and Thou, Martin Buber Never Give In!, Winston Churchill The Boer War, Winston Churchill The Second World War, Winston Churchill In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Cinema I, Gilles Deleuze Cinema II, Gilles Deleuze Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm and Karl Marx To Have or To Be?, Erich Fromm Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard The Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski Building A Character, Constantin Stanislavski Creating A Role, Constantin Stanislavski Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek Some titles are not available in North America. iv The Language of Fashion Roland Barthes Translated by Andy Stafford Edited by Andy Stafford and Michael Carter LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in France, 2004 by Editions du Seuil © Editions du Seuil, 1993 for Œuvres complètes – Tome 1 © Editions du Seuil, 1994 for Œuvres complètes – Tome 2 © Editions du Seuil, 1995 for Œuvres complètes – Tome 3 and ‘Preface [to the Fashion System]’ (originally published in the journal VWA in no. 25, 1998) Preface, English translation and afterword, © Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture, 2005 English edition first published outside Australia in 2006 by Berg Bloomsbury Revelations edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic Published in Association with Power Publications, Sydney All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-47250-542-2 ePub: 9781472534767 ePDF: 9781472534323 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Preface ix Part One Clothing History 1 1 History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations 3 2 Language and Clothing 20 3 Towards a Sociology of Dress 31 Part Two Systems and Structures 35 4 ‘Blue is in Fashion This Year’: A Note on Research into Signifying Units in Fashion Clothing 37 5 From Gemstones to Jewellery 54 6 Dandyism and Fashion 60 7 [An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 65 8 Fashion, a Strategy of Desire: Round-table Discussion with Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud and Henri Lefebvre 80 viii Contents 9 Fashion and the Social Sciences 85 10 On The Fashion System 92 Part Three Fashion Debates and Interpretations 97 11 The Contest between Chanel and Courrèges. Refereed by a Philosopher 99 12 A Case of Cultural Criticism 104 13 Showing How Rhetoric Works 108 Afterword Clothes, Fashion and System in the Writings of Roland Barthes: ‘Something Out of Nothing’ by Andy Stafford 113 Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements 159 Bibliography 161 Glossary of Names 165 Index 171 Preface The principal aim of this book is to bring together in one publication those writings on clothes and fashion by Roland Barthes which have yet to be translated into English. If Barthes is known for The Fashion System (1967, English translation 1985), his seminal if complex treatise on fashion systems and on how fashion is ‘written’, it is perhaps less known that he wrote also on hippies, on jewellery, and extensively on methodological problems within clothes history. It was this gap in both Barthes scholarship and in Fashion Studies that encouraged Michael Carter to ask me to translate and edit these writings. We have decided, however, not to include in this volume two of Barthes’s writings on theatrical costume; we considered that his important piece on the excesses and iniquities of certain types of theatre-costume design exists already in English translation, in a slightly abridged version in Barthes’s Critical Essays (1972 [1964]), and that, although the original version (appearing in Théâtre Populaire in 1955) has witty commentaries on photographs of certain costume disasters, we did not want to confuse the volume with considerations on the theatre. The same applies to Barthes’s other (brief) essay on theatre costume, a 1955 review of Hélène Parmelin’s livre d’artiste covering five twentieth-century costume designers in France. Other pieces on fashion, other than The Fashion System itself, are indeed available in English and are therefore not included here—mainly interviews given by Barthes around the time of the publication of The Fashion System—which can be found in The Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962–1980 (trans. Linda Coverdale, New York: Hill and Wang, 1985, 43–67). The idea of this book, initiated by Michael Carter, was to concentrate on the key writings on clothing that predate The Fashion System, in which Barthes tries to establish how and why people have dressed x Preface the way they do across the centuries, then to look at how Barthes moved away from clothes history towards fashion theory, and finally to set out where his analysis in The Fashion System went in the period immediately following. I say clothes and fashion, as this reflects a clear division in Barthes’s work. For, somewhere between 1959 and 1964, a decision was made to concentrate more on contemporary (written) fashion rather than on clothes (and their history). The division of this anthology into three parts—Clothing History, Systems and Structures, Fashion Debates and Interpretations—reflects these shifting concerns in Barthes’s research and theoretical reflections. The pieces presented in this book appeared originally in a variety of publications in France—academic, journalistic and industry-related—of which the social history journal Annales is the most preponderant. From Marie Claire to a Catholic auxiliary nurses’ publication, from Critique to Communications, Barthes’s writings on clothing and fashion are clearly interdisciplinary enough to appear in a wide range of different places. They all also chart the shifts, about-turns, ruptures and spirals of Barthes’s thought across the fast-paced intellectual culture of 1960s France. In twelve years, from 1957 to 1969, he goes from bemoaning the lack of decent histories of clothing to denouncing hippy ethnic fashion as a reactionary form of revolt, from using semiology to understand clothing to seeing the rhetoric of fashion as an impoverished and ultimately shallow producer of cultural forms, from considering the origins and functions of gemstones to watching a ‘joust’ between the rival fashion houses of Coco Chanel and André Courrèges. This anthology has been divided into three chronological sections in order to take account of these different phases in Barthes’s thought on clothing and fashion. The first part,Clothing History, shows Barthes in search of a solution to the thorny problem of accounting for clothing forms across history. ‘History and Sociology of Clothing’, published in the influential journal Annales in 1957, is a historical overview of hitherto existing studies on the history of clothing which discusses the weaknesses in classical, romantic, folkloric, ‘archaeological’, Marxist and psychological accounts of clothing forms.1 Barthes discusses in detail the impasse of History and Structure, Change and Order, within the newly emerging discipline of Cultural Studies, bemoaning the restrictive nature of the triumvirate dominating clothing explanations at the time, namely those of protection, modesty and ornamentation. This Preface xi methodological overview is also an early statement of Barthes’s intention to use Saussure’s semiology, Annales-inspired historical sociology and the newfangled science of structuralist linguistics, in an attempt to establish a viable history and sociology of clothing form. ‘Language and Clothing’, a book review for Critique appearing in 1959, then represents an important development in this work on clothing form in history, as Barthes slowly moves away from the ambitious programme of his earlier ‘History and Sociology of Clothing’ and towards the language of clothes. It contains the first hints of his interest in a sociology of contemporary fashion styles, following the realization