Table of Contents

Preface I. Clothing History 1. History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations 2. Language andClothing 3. Towards a Sociology of Dress II. Systems and Structures 4. 'Blue is In Fashion This Year': A Note on Research into Signifying Units in Fashion Clothing 5. From Gemstones to Jewellery 6. Dandyism and Fashion 7. [An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 8. Fashion, a Strategy of Desire: Round-table Discussion with Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud and Henri Lefebvre 9. Fashion and the Social Sciences(interview) 10. On The Fashion System III.Fashion Debates and Interpretations 11. The Contest Between Chanel andCourreges, Refereed by a Philosopher 12. A Case of Cultural Criticism 13.Showing How Rhetoric Works Afterword: Clothes, Fashion and System in the Writings of Roland Barthes: 'Something Out of Nothing', Andy Stafford Editor's Note and Acknowledgements Bibliography Glossary of Names Index.

Promotional Information

Roland Barthes' seminal writings on the cultural power of fashion and clothing.

About the Author

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society.

Reviews

No one can claim that translating Barthes is easy. Nor is it easy to assemble, as Stafford and Carter have done, such a chronologically revealing series of essays, to footnote their French sources and explain the citations in them so fully, to provide a glossary of writers to help explain the evolution of Barthes's thought, and to frame the whole with a theoretically acute history of twentieth-century social theory, dress history, and his assessment by friends and foes. The Language of Fashion is paradoxically (as Barthes would say) reader-friendly but also respectful of the difficulties of his thought, an excellent advanced introduction to his writing on la mode. -- Ann Rosalind Jones * H-France Review *