The discussion of how fashion involves codes which give or deny value to various behaviors and displays of consumption leads to the question of how a fashion system creates “fashionability.” While there are many ways that audiences show approval or disapproval - often non-verbal, such as the raised eyebrow, the look of disgust or admiration, neglect or imitation themselves - one of the most powerful ways of giving value to objects and behaviors, and moreover one which is possible to study in historical societies, is expression through words.
In some ways, this is the most important principle of fashion for this study. my premise that words are the key to detecting fashion is a departure from much of the methodology of fashion history, with its focus on the visual. Fashion has long been casually referred to as a “language,” but only recently have attempts been made to describe how it functions as a language beyond simply trying to decode the meanings of the fashions of a particular moment. attempts to decode fashion’s language generally fail to decipher anything completely, because any given combination of fashion signs proves almost endlessly polymorphous given any change in the variables of time, individual personality, and how far unconscious motivations are probed.76 While language’s role in fashion is at times implied in Lipovetsky and Blumer’s theories, neither gives it a prominent, explicit role. In a working theoretical definition of where fashion exists and how it functions, the process by which language gives value to fashion should be given major consideration.
The overarching lesson of Roland Barthes’ Systeme de la Mode is that fashion is necessarily a creation of language. While at the outset of the project Barthes sought to work out a semiology of real clothing, what he discovered along the way was that a fashionable garment is an ambiguous entity, a simultaneous creation of a visual system and a verbal system. It is the verbal system that gives value to a garment, labeling it “fashionable” or “out-of-date,” “outrageous” or “conservative.” Barthes showed that fashion is an economy whose currency is clothing, but whose exchange values are fixed by language. He understood desire as an essential functioning aspect of fashion. He found desire to be a product exclusively of words: it is not the object but the name that inspires desire.77 Summing up the project, he asked if clothing is capable of having meaning without words, beyond a few rudimentary indications like looking eccentric, classic, dandified, sporty, or ceremonial. He found that outside of words, there is no “essential Fashion,” no “Fashion system.” Fashion simply does not function as a complete system without words. He decided that to study fashion it is not reasonable to favor the real garment over the words. on the contrary, it is only logical to proceed from the word to the real.
The goal of description, Barthes reasoned, is to transform an object into language. In literature, description takes its cue from a hidden object, real or imaginary. Its goal is to make the object exist for the reader. (Fashion writing of the kind found in magazines, in contrast, seeks to demonstrate the qualities of a garment represented by an image on the same page, albeit only partially visible.) Barthes gave words three functions in fashion description; these may be adapted to describe fashion descriptions in literature such as those to be analyzed in later chapters in this book. First, words immobilize perception at a certain level of intelligibility, directing the eye towards what is important to notice. (hence the danger of studying costume history exclusively from pictures, where the words are lacking to convey what contemporaries found important in them.) In literature, it follows that this function is still in play, although to a different degree: the reader is allowed to imagine any appearance whatsoever for a character until description intervenes to limit the possibilities afforded the mind’s eye. Then there is what Barthes called “connaissance”: words impart information. In fashion writing, this information may entail anything inaccessible to the eye in the picture, such as color, small details, the back view. The “connaissance” function of words also conveys abstract functions, such as “fun/ classic,” or the sanction of fashionable/unfashionable. In literature, this function exists as well, but without the benefit of an adjacent image it bears greater responsibility.78 Barthes’ third function of description is emphasis. In fashion writing, words often repeat certain clearly visible elements in the picture. The need for emphasis, in all kinds of writing, lies in the intrinsically discontinuous nature of language. Language can never render an entire garment. It can only present a series of choices, of “amputations”: the limits of the described garment are not those of the real material, but those of value relative to the ensemble. For example, if a leather belt is mentioned, it signifies that the fact that it is leather has absolute importance - while other details, such as form, buckles, and so on, are so to speak amputated, relegated to the realm of the unknowable. The emphasis function of description shows the reader only what the author saw as having relevance and imparting useful information about an outfit’s fashion value.79
Barthes’ analysis primarily highlights the complex and paradoxical relation of words, fashion values, visual images, and material reality. Words are necessary to make something fashionable, but the garment (or object) can never be fully captured by them. The written garment is carried by language, but it also resists language. it is created by the play between the two. Fashion can be read, but the garment cannot. As Barthes put it, if one were to try actually to construct a garment described in a magazine, the points of uncertainty would be endless: the form, the number, disposition of white polka dots... This caveat is important because it demonstrates both the importance and the limits of the verbal when analyzing fashion. To understand fashion, it is imperative to go to words, for they are the “fashion-creating machine.”78 at the same time, words permit only an understanding of exchange values, they do not facilitate a reliable reconstruction. They tell us what was important to contemporaries, what was “visible” in the sense of what was worth noticing. They also leave an infinite amount to the imagination.
Words can impart fashionability, for example whenever someone declares that “red is ‘in’” or when a hero wears something striking in a romance. Words also serve opponents of a fashion and even of consumption in general, but not necessarily with the effect of preventing or limiting fashion. The important and complex role which criticism plays in fashion must not be neglected.
World History
