In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes talks not about the garments that construct the system of fashion but about the written text that breathes life, gives meaning to, constructs myth around said garments. This presents, or rather resolves, the chicken-or-the-egg question about the Fashion System and its operations in the larger cultural context. What came first: prints at the races or the Vogue article about prints at the races? In both The Fashion System and “Myth Today”, Barthes describes the process of the appropriate of myth in society via discourse. He therefore separates the physical object of the printed dress, for example, from the written code that signifies and equates it with fashion. This is most basically explained at the beginning of “Myth Today” when Barthes describes how, “things pass from closed, silent existence to an oral [or written] state, open to appropriate by society” (Mythologies 109). To apply this to the process by which a garment goes from a silent, soley technological existence to a Fashion sign, Barthes describes how the writing of fashion signifies the signified ideology of fashion. Without the writing and discourse of fashion which makes up the vestimentary code, “fashion is an arbitrary value” (Fashion System 39).
To summarize briefly that which Barthes explains almost to the point of exhaustion, there are two types of relationships that can be formed in the utterances that signify the ideology of fashion. The explicit, “Set A”, or the “real vestimentary code” is a sentence that set up an equation between real clothing and the world. For example, “prints win at the races” equates the real garment with the activity in the world. Set B implicitly establishes the vestimentary code in that the clothing signifies Fashion itself without relating it to a concrete place or action (“women will shorten skirts to the knee”(37)). These two sets operate on the most elemental level of the rhetorical system of fashion; They become the signified for the “Written vestimentary code” which them is the signifier of the “Connotation of Fashion” which finally comes to signify the “Rhetorical system” (37).
What stuck with me from Barthes’ analysis of the method by which fashion rhetoric emerges was the life breathed into the garment by the written word. I was skeptical to place so much responsibility on fashion reporting and magazines, not wanting to blindly accept or even relate Barthes to what Meryl Streep proposes in the The Devil Wears Prada. But, after revisiting Mythologies I realized the primary importance of discourse in creating myth. This relationship of dependency that Barthes poses between the speech/image/discourse and the real object is still turning in my mind. In “Myth Today he writes, “mythical speech is made of a material which as already been worked on” (110). Then in The Fashion System, he takes apart he “already worked on” material and at the hands of the description. He writes “The described garment is a fragmentary garment”. All that is coded as fashion is what is chosen to be emphasized in the discourse. “Prints” or “white details” or “open collars” (what Barthes terms “variants”) stand alone in the description as a fragment of the real. This investigation of whole material existence but fragmentary and amputated rhetorical existence could prove to be an interesting topic to explore and develop in a physical project.
today, with the fading of print journalism, websites like Style.com are the source for fashion tips and thus the creators of the fashion rhetoric. This screenshot shows the new, most explicit and image-dependent ways of constructing the real vestimentary code. These flat images of garments are equated with real life activities and places such as, as seen here, the summer music festival. Does this change the way the fashion rhetoric is constructed from what Barthes was saying? Is it more didactic or less or is that not even an issue?
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