The Fashion System

Fashion never ceases to interest psychologists, aestheticians and sociologists. Roland Barthes, however, examined fashion from a new point of view. Using descriptions from magazines, he uncovered a system of meaning and subjected it for the first time to semantic analysis. The Fashion System, published in France in 1967, is bold and imaginative. In his endeavour to confine his love, outrage and passion for fashion to a system, Barthes created a work of literature that is witty, humane, personal and enormously stimulating.

The object of this inquiry is the structural analysis of women's clothing as currently described by Fashion magazines: its method was originally inspired by the general science of signs postulated by Saussure under the name semiology.