The contemporary fashion system

When Roland Barthes wrote The Fashion System, he sought to analyze the products of written civilization—fashion magazines, their photo captions, as makers of social mythology and fashion sense. Fifty years on, the written dress codes have changed—they do not hark back to the memory of “teas at Juan-les-Pins”; they no longer offer clear expressions of meaning. In fact, they list, in an almost mechanical way, meaningful content (i.e. trench), materials (i.e. cotton), and brand (i.e. Burberry). Visual texts have changed: they have passed from a “neat” representation of dress, which is complete and detailed, to a syncretic photo requiring a continuous interpretative effort, helped by the captions that become clues to reconstructing shapes and labels. Sometimes the main subject is not the model themself, but the scenery and its objects, which, for the most part, do not communicate anything about the social background of the dress. The discussion of fashion has found its way onto websites and social networks, changing their communicative style. The present-day system of fashion is different to that described by Barthes. It differs to previous decades, too, and as such it is time to re-analyze it. My purpose is to look at changes in the fashion system from Barthes onwards, through an analysis of fashion magazines, websites, and blogs, etc. The corpus of my research stretches from the 1960s to today. The key concept in understanding the “new” fashion system is the body—its changing proportions in fashion mirror the cultural and identitymaking metamorphoses of society. Studying fashion is not limited to studying dresses. It involves examining the way they are worn, the ways bodies are hidden or enhanced, and the movements, gestures and attitudes typical of an age.