ONLINE DOSSIER: ROLAND BARTHES »THE FASHION SYSTEM«

Barthes, Roland. “The Fashion System.” Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1985.
»But what is remarkable about this image-system constituted with desire as its goal […] is that its substance is essentially intelligible: it is not the object but the name that creates desire; it is not the dream but the meaning that sells.« (p. xii)
»We have seen that the units of image-clothing are located as the level of forms, those of written clothing at the level of words; as for the units of real clothing, they cannot exist a the level of language, for, as we know, language is not a tracing of reality; nor can we locate them, although here the temptation is great, at the level of forms, for “seeing” a real garment, even under privileged conditions of presentation, cannot exhaust its reality, still less its structure; we never see more than part of a garment, a personal and circumstantial usage, a particular way of wearing it; […].« (p. 4–5)
»For first translation, from the technological garment to the iconic garment, […] to which should be added the process, graphic or photographic, intended to reveal the technical substratum of a look or an “effect”: accentuation of a movement, enlargement of a detail, angle of vision.« (p. 6)
»[…] the image makes the purchase unnecessary, it replaces it; we can intoxicate ourselves on images, identify ourselves oneirically with the model, and, in reality, follow Fashion merely by purchasing a few boutique accessories; speech, on the contrary, rids the garment of all corporal actuality; […] The image provokes a fascination, speech an appropriation; the image is complete, it is a saturated system; speech is fragmentary, it is an open system: when combined, the latter serves to disappoint the former.« (p. 17)
»cardigan * collar * open = sporty
cardigan * collar * closed = dressy« (p. 61)
»Socioprofessional models
[…] in Fashion, work is only a simple reference, it provides identity, then immediately loses its reality: secretary, librarian, press attaché, student are all “names,” actually epithets of nature, destined paradoxically to found what could be called the being of doing […]. Invariably, whenever Fashion grants a woman a job, this job is neither entirely noble (it is not well taken that women really compete with men) nor entirely inferior: it is always a “clean” job: secretary, decorator, bookseller; and this job always remains subject to the type of what could be called jobs of devotion(as formerly those of nurse and reader to an old lady): the woman's identity is thus established, in the service of Man (the boss), of Art, of Thought […].« (p. 253)
»Character essences: “personality”
[…] Fashion presents the woman as a representation, in such a way that a simple attribute of the person, spoken in the form of an adjective, actually absorbs this person's entire being […]; personality here is compound, but it is not complex; in Fashion, the individualization of the person depends on the number of elements in play, and still better, if it is possible, on their apparent opposition (demure and determined, tender and tough, casual and cunning): these psychological paradoxes have a nostalgic value: they give evidence of a dream of wholeness according to which the human being would be everything at once, without having to choose, i.e., without having to emphasize any feature in particular (Fashion, we know, does not like to make choices, i.e., to hurt anyone); the paradox consists then of maintaining the generality of the characteristics (which alone is compatible with the institution of Fashion) in a strictly analytical state: it is generality of accumulation, not of synthesis: in Fashion, the person is thus simultaneously impossible and yet entirely known.« (p. 254–255)
»Identity and otherness: the name and the game
The accumulation of tiny psychological essences, often even opposing ones, is merely a way for Fashion to give the human person a double postulation: to confer either individuation or multiplicity, depending on whether the collection of characteristics is considered a synthesis or whether, on the contrary, we assume that this being is free to be masked behind one or the other of these units.« (p. 255)
»Feminity
[…] feminine clothing can absorb nearly all masculine clothing, which is content to “reject” certain features of feminine clothing (a man may not wear a skirt, while a woman may wear pants); this is because the taboo of the other sex does not have the same force in both cases: there is a social prohibition against the feminization of men, there is almost none against the masculinization of women: Fashion notably acknowledges the boyish look. […] androgyny; but what is more remarkable in this new term is that it effaces sex to the advantage of age; this is, it seems, a profound process of Fashion: it is age which is important, not sex; on the one hand, the model's youth is constantly asserted, defended, we might say, because it is naturally threatened by time (whereas sex is a given), and it must constantly be recalled that youth is the standard for all measurements of age (still young, forever young): its fragility creates its prestige; and on the other hand, in a homogeneous universe (since Fashion deals only with the Woman, for women), it is to be expected that the phenomenon of opposition should shift to where there is perceptible, rational variation: thus, it is age which receives the values of glamor and seduction.« (p. 257–258)
»The euphoria of Fashion
There is, however, one point at which the Woman of Fashion differs in a decisive manner from the models of mass culture: she has no knowledge of evil, to any degree whatsoever. For, not having to deal with her defects and her difficulties, Fashion never speaks of love, it knows neither adultery nor affairs nor even flirtation: in Fashion, a woman always travels with her husband. Does she know about money? Barely; she can no doubt distinguish big budgets from average budgets; Fashion teaches how to “adapt” a garment, not how to make it last.« (p.261)
»(Real) Fashion, we might say, is p / d [dilapidation (d), constituted by the natural replacement time of a garment or wardrobe, on the exclusive level of material needs; and a rhythm of purchase (p)]. If d = p, fi the garment is replaced as soon as it is worn out, there is no Fashion; if d > p, if the garment is worn beyond its natural replacement time, there is pauperization; of p > d, if a person buys more than he wears, there is Fashion, and the more the rhythm of purchase exceeds the rhythm of dilapidation, the stronger the submission to Fashion.« (p. 297–298)
»[…] Fashion (and this is increasingly the case) photographs not only its signifiers [i.e., the garment] but its signified as well, at least insofar as they are drawn from the “world” […].
In Fashion photography, the world is usually photographed as a decor, a background or a scene, in short as a theater. The theater of Fashion is always thematic: an idea (or, more precisely, a word) is varied through a series of examples or analogies.« (p. 301)
»What is the point of these protocols (poetic, romantic, or “outrageous”)? Probably, and by a paradox which is merely apparent, to make Fashion's signified unreal. The province of these styles is always, in fact, a certain rhetoric: by putting its signified in quotation marks, so to speak, Fashion keeps its distance with regard to its own lexicon; and thereby, by making its signified unreal, Fashion makes all the more real its signifier, i.e., the garment; through this compensatory economy, Fashion shifts the accommodation of its reader from an excessively but uselessly signifying background to the reality of the model, without, however, paralyzing that model in the rhetoric which it freezes on the margins of the scene.« (p. 302–303)