Although it has been touted as “the most boring book ever written about fashion” (Moeran 2004), Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System is considered a seminal work in modern fashion studies representing one of the first attempts to systematically apply linguistic theories to clothing. Written in the 1960s, the work was not translated into English until the 1980s and, like much of Barthes’ writings, had a bigger impact in his native France than in America. Barthes is perhaps better known for his literary criticism, but he demonstrated a career-long interest in nonverbal systems of signification, fashion among them. The subject of this review is a recent compilation of a number of Barthes’ minor writings on fashion and clothing published by a leading disseminator of scholarly works on dress and material culture, Berg. Including scholarly articles, popular essays originally appearing in fashion magazines like Marie Claire, interviews, and an early version of The Fashion System’s preface, The Language of Fashion draws upon diverse sources to offer the results of roughly a decade of investigation through examples previously unavailable in English translation.
The Language of Fashion is most successful as a supplement to Barthes’ The Fashion System and as an exploration of this scholar’s intellectual development in relation to linguistic and structuralist models for studying clothing. Organized into three sections that thematically and chronologically follow phases of Barthes’ work, each section is positioned in relation to the completion of The Fashion System with Part I and Part III representing pre- and post-considerations respectively. Part I, “Clothing History,” reveals Barthes’ early interest in combining the concerns of historical and sociological approaches with Saussure-inspired “semiology” to evaluate society’s “overall axiology (constraints, prohibitions, tolerances, fantasies, congruences, and exclusions)” of dress (4). The writings in this section demonstrate a clear consideration of worn garments and meanings connected to substantial form uncharacteristic of his later works. Barthes argues that dress, like language, is composed of both “an individual act and a collective institution” (8), a notion that both anticipates many of the structuralist/semiotic material culture studies of the 1970s in America (like Henry Glassie’s innovative development of a “grammar” for vernacular architecture) and current studies that theorize dress as “situated bodily practice” (Entwistle 2000).
The writings presented in Parts II (“Systems and Structures”) and III (“Fashion Debates and Interpretations”) exhibit a turn away from a dialectic between structure and praxis toward a “pure” structure unhampered by the messiness of lived experience and social negotiation. Barthes analyzes the “transformation of an object into language” (99) through the arbitrary and systematic application of rhetoric; the tropes of fashion writing, for example, help create and apply naturalized “truths” to particular fashion images on a synchronic basis and thus spark commerce. Barthes operates under a theoretical model that presumes that nonverbal signs require the precision of language to “fix” a meaning or interpretation to them, an idea more fully realized in the recent work of anthropologist Webb Keane (1997). Unlike Keane, Barthes never adequately demonstrates the successes or failures of attempts to linguistically “code” the material world, because, in his case, he remains uninterested in how the rhetoric of fashion media translates into worn garments or the interpretations of beholders.
While the contemporary folklorist or scholar of material culture may feel more kinship with Barthes’ earlier work, Parts II and III still, at moments, speak directly to folkloristic sensibilities. Barthes, for example, repeatedly proclaims fashion as a tension between tradition and innovation in which continuity rather than “unfettered creativity” is the driving force (92). He states that “an invention which is purely that of combining remains an invention. A limited number of elements to be combined can produce the impression, a justified one, of a creation” (89). Not unlike the decision of a storyteller to replace one dramatis persona with that of another in a fairy tale (Propp 1968) or of a builder to construct one-third of a house plan rather than the whole (Glassie 2000), Barthes maintains that despite arguments of inexhaustible genius the fashion industry is not free of “the systematic and the habitual” (92).
The compilation of writings is enhanced as a collection by an insightful afterword by Andy Stafford that places Barthes’ career and scholarly development within the context of larger intellectual movements by tracking the scholar’s deployment of different theoretical approaches in his examination of fashion. In addition to Stafford’s framing preface and afterword, The Language of Fashion includes a bibliography of works by and about Barthes as well as a glossary of names mentioned within the compiled items. Despite this volume’s intellectual and historiographic value, it does not always present pleasant reading. Stafford, also responsible for the volume’s translations from French to English, explains in the “Editor’s Notes and Acknowledgements” that he opted for “precision in the translation” in order to preserve the essayistic style characteristic of “the great French tradition” (166). However, this methodology creates absurdly long, convoluted sentences in English that are regularly and confusingly linked by colons and semicolons in strings of three or four units. A translation that honors the compositional spirit of the original is admirable, but it should equally honor the grammatical rules of the language of translation. Regardless of this minor complaint, the English-speaking scholarly community is better off for the effort.
Works Cited:
Clark, Jennifer, ed. Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2007.
Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
Glassie, Henry. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975.
____________. Vernacular Architecture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Keane, Webb. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Moeran, Brian. A Japanese Discourse of Fashion and Taste. Fashion Theory 8 (2004):35-62.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968 [1928].
--------
[Review length: 976 words • Review posted on March 19, 2008]