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Title: The Fashion System by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard, Matthew Ward ISBN: 0-520-07177-8 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: September, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Center/Fold
Comment: For any reader who has had a father that read *Playboy* "for the articles," even Barthes' highly analytical approach to the relation between image and text--which he insists *produces* Fashion or "real clothing"--can be funny. I.e., reading in translation the American reader may not identify so much with the eccentricities of Barthes' style so much as his choice of subject. Barthes' work remains entirely relevant, even though the book was published in 1967--the decade where fashion models withered, along with any grand sense of ethics on the part of commercial artists, clothing designers, and filmmakers, down to nothing. Perhaps Barthes would say this Nothing was a *commentary.* Perhaps not. But certain details of Barthes' analysis hold very interesting still: for example, the fact that Barthes refers to the way the "written-garment" in a layout calls attention to specific portions of the "image-garment" as "amputations" (15).
For the reader, it's important to place the book into some sort of context, as Context is Barthes' entire position when he insists that in relation to popular imagery, text "arrests the level of reading at its fabric, at its belt, at the accessory which adorns it" (13). Barthes' idea that the language used by magazine writers does not comment upon but rather *creates* Fashion arouses some questions about certain social centerpieces in, for example, popular (once "folk") music: Janis Joplin to Madonna to Britney Spears. While Barthes clear interest is a structuralized definition of Fashion, not women, studying Barthes' book may help us understand at a more analytical level just what these women "mean" as they are mediated through imagery and arrested by their respective (worn and written) articles. Barthes is crucial for anybody who has ever noticed that, compared to that which accompanied artists of Joplin's caliber , the accompanying texts of contemporary magazines read, more often than not, like a report of Time Temperature and Date.
Furthermore, the book certainly becomes enjoyable for the more fantastic-minded who could envision a day when fashion magazines no longer have to rely on flamboyant nudity, tasteful or otherwise, or suggestive postures, but wherein nudity and erotic positions are implied in a truly Barthean, truly erotic manner: by the fact that all text has been stripped bare. After all, even in a picture-mag where there is no writing, there is still, if one reads Barthes, *writing*. This reviewer would imagine that in Barthes' eyes, the old fashioned critique of the ironic incongruities between the image and the text of other vestments of fashion (such as shampoo commercials whose orgiastic imagery and sounds have nothing to do with the actual product) could be easily solved by one magazine, of any kind, that had no writing at all but consisted entirely of centerfolds.
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Title: Fashion, Culture, and Identity by Fred Davis ISBN: 0226138097 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: June, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Seeing Through Clothes by Anne Hollander ISBN: 0520082311 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory by Joanne Entwistle ISBN: 0745620078 Publisher: Polity Pr Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing by Diana Crane ISBN: 0226117995 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Mythologies by Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers ISBN: 0374521506 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1972 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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