Between 1957 and 1969, Roland Barthes produced a body of writing about the codes of fashion, centred on his book The Fashion System. At its heart is the thesis that real, everyday clothing is secondary to the ways in which it can be articulated in the rhetoric of fashion editorials and fashion spreads. This paper takes up Barthes’ challenge and examines the dialectic between written clothing and image clothing to analyse fashion,
I have to admit that I went to this seminar because jeans are such an iconographic item, personally and culturally. My first pair of jeans has a near ‘rite of passage’ status in my memory. They had to be Levi’s – much better than Wranglers –I was certainly too young to know why I wanted jeans, although I do have a memory of liking the fit and the texture of the cloth, they seemed like clothes of substance, and had to be shrunk to fit by sitting in a bath. What was interesting about Paul’s research was the connection with the ‘new man’ of the late 1980’s and 1990’s in jeans adverts. The new man being identified in a different way to the male in clothes advertising in previous decades. This is a slightly different, but not necessarily conflicting, interpretation of the cultural significance of jeans to mine. I have understood ‘jeans’ as part of a mythologizing, and heroising of manual work and by association the working class, formalised by the ‘new deal’ in America and in Britain by the implementation of the welfare state,1 and the post second world war promise of a fairer, better life for all; A dream that had taken on a night-mareish quality by the 1970’s in the UK. The advertising campaigns of the, 80’s and 90’s, of Bartle, Bogle and Hegerty and Yellowhammer; the stars, were rhetoric, but it was the rhetoric of a superbly manipulative and subversive kind. In these ads the fading image of the heroic worker as imaged in Marlboro Man ads and countless films and books2 substituted sexuality for equal status (for the working class) the substitute, Nick Kamen for James Dean and Marlon Brando in the Levi ads stripping down to convince the (working class?) women of England that their mythical man was still a hunk, even though the miners were being Royally raped by the British government in 1984. There is an interesting point here, why should the sneaky female gaze be allowed in the Levi ads? (a historical blasphemy) This is what is unusual in these particular ads, and what was notable (to me) at the time; the women are looking at the bare (working class) man. It seems to me that these ads, particularly the Levi ads formed part of a class or societal dialogue that is coninual, sometimes subtle sometimes not so much. By 1984 the power of the working class, in both economic and mythological terms had declined. In 1997 – with no irony? – the naked bodies of working class men were exposed to their women in ‘The full Monty.’3 To return to jeans and Barthes assertion that everyday clothing is secondary in articulation to the ‘rhetoric of fashion editorials and fashion spreads’; the relationship is more complicated (I think) it involves a non vocal articulation of meaning between a mesh, a non specific network, an engaged populace who express themselves by the acceptance, or not of potential ‘images’ offered through written and visual media. The articulation of clothing through magazines etc needs a reciprocal re-articulation by the reader/viewer (or visa versa) to say secondary implies a primacy and dominance for text that is simplistic.
A situation that was mirrored in Chinese society as described by Jung Chang in Wild Swans
CHANG, J. (1991). Wild swans: three daughters of China. New York, Simon & Schuster.http://www.mrporter.com/journal/journal_issue114/4?cm_sp=thelook- -theclassics--140513Another famous ‘near naked man’ ad; the diet coke ad appeared in 1994, http://socialmediamarketerpro.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/coca-cola-does- workthatmatters/