Fashion As "Scientific Poem": The Semiotics Studies of Greimas and Barthes

In this paper, I intend to present a case in which the history of fashion and the history of linguistic-semiotic studies interconnected in a significant way: the field of fashion was identified by two of the founding fathers of present-day semiotics—Algirdas Julien Greimas and Roland Barthes—as a subject deserving close study and at the crossroads of diachrony and synchrony; history and the system. Two important works testify to this: La mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d’après les journaux de l’époque by Greimas (2000) and the much better known Système de la mode by Barthes (1990).