In Mythologies, Barthes hinted that fashion magazines might provide
a ready field for semiological analysis. In The Fashion System
(published in France in 1967), he appears at his semantical worst -
and, ultimately, some of his perceptive best - analyzing the
written fashion descriptions in Elle and Le Jardin des Modes,
instead of their visual presentation, because "it is not the object
but the name that creates desire; it is not the dream but the
meaning that sells." He divides clothing items and details into
"species" and "genera"; he takes seemingly innocent phrases such as
"prints win at the races" and finds hidden transformations
occurring from the rhetorical code to the terminological to the
vestimentary. Fashion signs can contain explicit references to the
world or implicit references to the ideology of fashion itself. In
the first instance, the dominant metaphor is work, the curiously
inactive activity of dressing up. "To dress in order to act is, in
a certain way, not to act, it is to display the being of doing,
without assuming its reality." When it is fashion itself which is
signified, it assumes the guise of natural law, imperative and
agentless. "What is decided on, imposed, finally appears as
necessary. . . for this to take place, it is enough to keep the
Fashion decision secret; who will make it obligatory that this
summer's dresses be made of raw silk?" Thus, answering his initial
question, "Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly," Barthes
succeeds in revealing how fashion language draws a veil around the
fashion object, "a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings; a
mediating substance of an aperitive order. . . substituting for the
slow time of wear a sovereign time free to destroy itself by an act
of annual potlatch." Linguists may appreciate his precise
dissection of codes and matrices; most other readers may suffer
through the semantics to enjoy the closing and far more anarchic
perceptions. (Kirkus Reviews)
In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine--the
structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers
about fashion--Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At
the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for
the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating,
industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't
calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same
consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the
very slow rate of its dilapidation."
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