STUDIOVOICE #4 — Roland Barthes on Mode

The original text was written in Japanese for STUDIOVOICE on April 5, 2012. This English version translates and edits the text embedded in the archival page image.

Roland Barthes, Selected Writings on Mode

The Uncontainable Libidinal Energy of the Researcher

Many people may have heard the title The Fashion System, written by Roland Barthes between 1915 and 1980. Those who cannot easily understand fashion as an organized field, and those curious about how a scholar such as Barthes grasped the object called fashion, will probably find this newly translated and edited collection useful.

According to the editors, this volume traces the process through which Barthes arrived at The Fashion System. Essays, reviews, and other texts written before that book allow us to see not only the finished theoretical structure, but also Barthes’s life as thought: his hesitations, movements, and appetite as a writer.

Fashion, as Barthes indicates, is not simply clothing. It is a system, a structure, a language, and often an environment dense enough to make any attempt at orderly classification feel slightly ridiculous. To study an already arranged system is like tasting a carefully prepared dish. But fashion is closer to entering a restaurant with no menu, no waiter, no reliable order, and with one’s stomach still insistently present.

Reading these essays, one senses Barthes’s frustration with fashion research as it existed at the time. Perhaps the people who saw him only as a philosopher or critic missed his real pressure point. The analytical desire of the researcher, and an uncontainable libidinal energy, seem to have given birth to The Fashion System.

For anyone interested not only in fashion but in modern culture, Barthes remains one of those unavoidable roads. The essays on “The History of Clothing and Society,” “Language and Clothing,” and “For a Sociology of Clothing” organize the confusion around fashion with a rare clarity. They also reveal how easily fashion escapes the very systems created to capture it.

Barthes was drawn to the linguistic and semiotic character of clothing, from Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s work to the distinction between dress and costume. What mattered to him was not the romantic idea of fashion as mere image, but the way clothes circulate between individual choice, social convention, media, and language.

The final interviews are especially revealing. Asked why his analysis remained limited to written descriptions of women’s clothes in fashion magazines, Barthes answered that the limitation was methodological. If images had been included, he would have had to move from semiology into psychology, where the image is notoriously impure and dangerously seductive.

The editor writes that written clothing creates mode. Or rather, mode does not exist first and then get described by media; it exists because media speaks it. That may be the most provocative lesson here. Barthes knew the difficulty of studying fashion, and perhaps he also knew that the most ordinary structure of an object can be the richest place to begin.

Roland Barthes
Selected Writings on Mode
Translated and edited by Toyoko Yamada, Chikuma Gakugei Bunko.