Roland Barthes. El sentido de la moda

Abstract

Roland Barthes devoted much of his intellectual interest to the phenomenon of fashion. Long before his famous Système de la Mode, he wrote numerous essays on the subject, mainly of a methodological nature, both to elaborate a coherent historiography of dress and to establish a semiology of dress itself, distinguishing –with Saussure– between costume (langue) and clothing (parole). Indeed, if dress is a heteroclite whole, like language for Saussure, the semiologist’s task is to reconstruct its functioning as a system of signs, not only in the dress described by the magazines (as he does in Système), but also in the dress actually worn. A set of essays, in short, of extreme importance for anyone who wants to deal with fashion today, in all its aspects.