The Language of Fashion

191 Pages·2013·0.622 MB·

by  Roland Barthes

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
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London New York
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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