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Fashion, Theory, and the Everyday: Barthes, Baudrillard, Lipovetsy, MaffesoliAuthor(s): Michael SheringhamSource: Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 53 (Winter 2000), pp. 144-154Published by: Dalhousie UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40838243Accessed: 24-07-2016 18:03 UTC

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Fashion, Theory, and the Everyday: Barthes, Baudrillard, Lipovetsy, Maffesoli

Michael Sheringham

Sit least since Baudelaire, theoretical or philosophical speculation about fashion has been closely linked with the notions of the ephemeral and the present. Even if the author of "Le peintre de la vie moderne," an essay largely inspired by the success of Constantin Guys in capturing the fleeting reality of costumes and manners, contrasts fashion with "la vie naturelle" - "La mode doit être considérée comme un symptôme du goût de l'idéal surnageant dans le cerveau humain au-dessus de tout ce que la vie naturelle y accumule de grossier, de terrestre et d'immonde" (716) - he sees it as the expression of "modernité" whose essence is "le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent." Fashion offers privileged access to what, in a strikingly paradoxical formulation, Baudelaire calls "la mémoire du présenti," a dimension of experience harbouring "la valeur et les privilèges de la circonstance : car presque toute notre originalité vient de l'estampille que le temps imprime à nos sensations" (696). Not only in the sphere of art, but also in that of the individual, identity may be as much a function of the passing moment as of the permanent or durable. Whence, in part, the dignity of fashion since, as Georg Simmel argued at the turn of the last century, "la mode aiguise de plus en plus la conscience du présent" (quoted by Maffesoli 152).

But what is the present in this context? I suggest that for Baudelaire, Simmel, and for later theorists to be considered here, it means two rather different yet closely interconnected things. The present is what is historically current or contemporary: particular styles manifested concretely in dress, artefacts, forms of behaviour that can be described and classified. But, more diffusely, it is also the feel or atmosphere of what is all around us at the moment, the ever-changing kaleidoscopic totality that we are part of but cannot see. In Baudelaire's account, the present is what Guys attunes himself to as he plunges into the city crowd. Under this aspect the palpable but elusive present of "la vie parisienne" is designated as "le merveilleux [qui] nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l'atmosphère ; mais nous ne le voyons pas" (496). These two aspects of the present are reflected in two approaches which highlight different dimensions of fashion. Since Baudelaire, along a line running through Mallarmé (editor of a fashion magazine, La dernière mode), Apollinaire, and the Surrealists, fashion serves as a conduit into the manifold present which is apprehended through experiences that constantly blur the distinction between the subjective and the objective. But outside this avant-garde line, historical and theoretical "readings" of fashion tend to go separate ways. In the course of the twentieth century there is a steady evolution in documentary or archival research studying changing styles, designers, materials, fashion institutions, and social or psychological enquiries analysing the values and meanings attributed to dress (and other aspects of life touched by fashion), and the impact of historical pressures on changes of style. The impact of the Annales historians, sociology, gender theory, and cultural studies brings about further theoretical elaboration and fosters the mounting of major exhibitions such as the 1998 "Art and Fashion" at London's Hay ward Gallery, and the creation of journals bearing articles on women in wartime or "The Carole Lombard look," or the theatricality of dress in today's malls. Yet the historicising basis of these approaches denies any particular status to the present. I want to argue, however, that the other, "Baudelairean," way of looking at the present through the prism of fashion is preserved and developed in some recent theories or

Dalhousie French Studies 53 (2000) - 144-


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philosophies of fashion, starting with Barthes's notorious Système de la mode (1967) To establish this, however, I introduce a wider category under which reflections on fashion can be subsumed, that of the "quotidien," the everyday.

Like fashion, everyday life can be viewed in two ways: on one hand, through empirical studies of daily life in Ancient Rome, the German occupation, or studies of consumerism, advertising, and TV watching. On the other hand, through attempts, such as those of Henri Lefebvre or Michel de Certeau, to grasp the everyday as a particular level of human reality. The "quotidien" is seen as the level of generic activities that we (have to) do every day: eat, dress, communicate, work, relax, rest, travel, all of which can be done in different ways - à la mode de chez nous, as the nursery rhyme has it - , producing different patterns and rhythms, diverse styles of life. Fashion is relevant here because it helps explain why at a given time groups of people are moved to do some things roughly the same way, for example dress in black, pierce their bodies, or eat pizza in front of the TV, and why a year later they are all doing it another way. To think about fashion is to think about how we go from one configuration of daily existence to another. The everyday is what we sally forth into, the atmosphere that envelops us. It is where we are when we wake up in the morning, before we direct ourselves to some specific sector or more specialised activity. Fashion inheres in the everyday as part of what we are surrounded by, part of the backdrop to our lives, accounting for the ambience of particular times and places. But fashion is also one of the forces leading us to do things this way rather than that, part of what orientates us within a wider field - pushing us to wear, eat, think about, value certain things rather than others. It is both an agency and an anthology, a list of things that are conspicuous, "hot," at a specific moment. To say that something is in fashion is to make a métonymie link between a fashionable trait or item and a period. And the whole of which the phenomenon is an aspect is not so much the historical moment, political conjuncture, or phase in human self-understanding or scientific development, as the climate or feel of a particular period, the prevailing temperature of everydayness which, like fashion, is a present-tense phenomenon. To think about fashion and to think about the everyday involve focusing on the experience of the present.

Barthes

The connections between fashion, the present, and the everyday are central to Barthes's Système de la mode, although this tends to be obscured by the prevalence of "scientific" abstraction stemming from the adoption of an analytical method derived from Saussurean linguistics. Far from being an arid exercise in methodology applied arbitrarily or opportunistically to an indifferent topic, Barthes's text, completed in 1964, and based on studies undertaken over a six-year period following the publication of Mythologies (1957), reflects a lifelong interest in everyday life, and specifically in the challenge posed by the study of fashion. Barthes chose to base his analysis on a specific corpus - the 1958-59 issues of Elle and Le jardin des modes - but this restriction of focus, and ultimately of method, by no means represented indifference to wider contexts. Beginning with "Histoire et sociologie du vêtement" published in Annales in 1957, Barthes published a succession of articles in such journals as Critique, Annales (a second article in 1959), and the Revue française de sociologie, which revealed a broad knowledge of the extensive literature on the history, sociology and psychology of dress and costume. If the analytical mode adopted in Système de la mode represented disenchantment with diachronic approaches, it did not represent indifference to the human meaning of fashion. Indeed, Barthes's approach reflects the postulate that there is a dimension of fashion - namely how it works as a "system" at large in everyday life - that


146 Michael Sheringham

diachronic approaches fail to address. What Barthes studies in Système de la mode is the way fashion messages are produced and consumed. To be sure, Barthes argues that "la mode écrite" is a purely self-contained system that could function perfectly well even if real clothes (or at least clothes of the types evoked) did not exist. As a formal system "la mode" works through categories and oppositions that are timeless or operate in a kind of perpetual present. But, rather than excluding history or the "vécu," this means that certain phenomena - such as fashion, food, objects - which, by dint of their modes of dissemination and consumption, possess a degree of systematicity lending them to semiological analysis, exist both in the mode of history, where they change and interact with other phenomena, and in a mode that is independent of history. And one of the crucial observations this leads to is that the everyday existence of these things - fashion experienced as a facet of the "quotidien" - is more closely allied to their semiological - perpetual present - dimension than to their historical one. The everyday is of the present and of the lived ("vécu") - and fashion is apprehended not as a slowly changing evolution in real time, but as a synchronie system of relationships.

Barthes in fact argues at one point that the pressure fashion exerts is not historical. To be a dedicated follower of fashion is of course to be in thrall to the

latest, but in fashion the latest is not the most recent stage of a historical development, as it would be in the case of the American presidency, say, or microprocessors, where the latest refers to the latest incumbent (ontologically different from all others) or the latest model (technically different from all the others). In fashion the latest simply means the most recent turn of the wheel, the most recent configuration of meaning established through subtle or gross permutations of a relatively restricted number of ingredients. What we apprehend when we respond to fashion is the power of signification as process: "on entend toujours signification, non au sens courant de signifié, mais au sens actif de procès" (1967:53). Fashion creates powerful meanings out of tiny differences articulated in the most humdrum of media: pockets, buttons, waistlines; front/back, long/short; silk, taffeta, cotton; pink, blue, cerise.... Fashion discourse conjures up all kinds of mental pictures through its favoured scenarios of parties and social occasions, travel, leisure, domesticity, and occasionally work, but these lavish meanings are all pinned to details: "la fragilité de la Mode ne tient donc pas seulement à sa variabilité saisonnière, mais aussi au caractère gracieux de ses signes, au rayonnement d'un sens qui touche pour ainsi dire à distance les objets qu'il élit" (1967:75). However nebulous the worlds it conjures up, fashion rhetoric deals at one level with the highly concrete, specific and singular. One of the things Barthes celebrates in fashion - a feature which allies it to poetry - is that, although it is pure language, it deals primarily with the concrete: the "poétique du vêtement" (1967:239) makes the concrete signify. Barthes has great fun (although he taxes the reader's patience) in classifying all the ingredients that get conscripted into the signifying process of the fashion system and the different ways they combine to produce meanings. But whilst he admires its creative fertility, he notes the stereotyped character of the imaginaire articulated through fashion rhetoric, where nothing changes, and all is festive, idle, Utopian. His portrait of the "Femme de mode" is brilliant:

Féminine impérativement, jeune absolument, douée d'une identité forte et cependant d'une personnalité contradictoire, elle s'appelle Daisy ou Barbara ; elle fréquente la comtesse de Mun et Miss Phipps ; secrétaire de direction, son travail ne l'empêche pas d'être présente à toutes les fêtes de l'année et de la journée ; elle part chaque semaine en week-end et voyage tout le temps, à Capri, aux Canaries, à Tahiti, et cependant à chaque voyage


Barthes, Baudrillard, Lipovetsky, Maffesoli 147

elle va dans le Midi ; elle ne séjourne jamais que dans des climats francs, elle aime tout à la fois, de Pascal au cool-jazz... (1967:263)

Part of Système de la mode involves a critique (reminiscent of Mythologies) of how systems of signification in mass culture work to disguise culture as nature, to naturalise meanings that are in fact produced by an arbitrary process. Barthes shows how naturalisation is effected in the two main ways whereby fashion creates meanings. In both cases the signifier is the concrete fashion detail. One mode works referentially, invoking the "real world" through a mythology of the functional and the useful. The particular exigencies of weekends in Tahiti (!), or the contradictory requirement to be both serious and sexy at work, act as relays "explaining" the "need" for purple mohair, or two-tone buttons. But the real here is fantasmatic and "romanesque": "le réel impliqué par les fonctions de Mode est essentiellement défini par une contingence ; ce n'est pas un réel transitif, c'est, une fois de plus, un réel vécu d'une façon fantasmatique, c'est le réel irréel du roman, emphatique à proportion de son irréalité" (1967:268).

In the second mode (statements like "cet été les chapeaux étonneront, ils seront à la fois piquants et solennels" [1967:270]) naturalisation of the fashion phenomenon is effected by sheer assertion. Everything that is noted is deemed, or decreed, performatively, to be fashionable; what is not noted is ipso facto out of fashion: "l'être de la mode se donne immédiatement pour la loi" (1967:271). Fashion disguises its arbitrariness by playing up the peremptoriness of its diktats: "chaque fois que la Mode admet l'arbitraire de ses décisions, c'est sur un ton emphatique, comme si se prévaloir d'un caprice, c'était l'atténuer, comme si jouer un ordre, c'était du même coup l'irreali ser : la Mode inocule un peu d'arbitraire dans la rhétorique de ses décisions, pour mieux s'excuser de l'arbitraire qui les fonde" (1967:271). By its use of tenses and other features fashion rhetoric creates an autarchic universe, a reality founded on its own sagesse. Barthes gives a subtle analysis of the temporality involved here (1967:273), concluding that if the tyranny of fashion is its very essence, this rests on "une certaine passion du temps." Fashion is tyrannical because it involves a refusal to inherit the past. Unfaithful and forgetful, fashion delivers vendettas against what went just before, but at the same time seeks to present itself as part of a stable universe (fashion is not really revolutionary), disguising its hunger for a "présent absolu, dogmatique, vengeur" under a softer appearance through a rhetoric which creates a purely fictitious, relaxing order.

In his conclusion Barthes suggests that the "temporalité très particulière de la Mode" (1967:288) stems partly from the way it conjoins the two modes of signification already discussed. The contribution of the second mode- and especially instances where it is predominant - is particularly underlined in ways that indicate links between Barthes' s theory of fashion and his later engagement with the everyday. A key feature of the second type of signification is that it is purely denotative and tautological. This winter jackets are short and blue: nothing is predicated of the items except their own existence, yet a world of meaning is created. In this purely reflexive system "le sens n'est finalement que le signifiant lui-même." At play here is what Barthes, in a phrase that will feature prominently in his 1970s writings, notably L'empire des signes, calls "la déception du sens." For in this mode of signification it is the signifier alone that is on show. We are given to witness "le spectacle même de la signification" by a "système sémantique dont la seule fin est de décevoir le sens qu'il élabore luxueusement." Meaning exists with no obvious means of support. At this point (1967:287) Barthes draws a parallel with Mallarmé's La dernière mode, a fashion magazine which ran to eight issues entirely composed by the poet under pseudonyms such as Miss Satin. Barthes notes that La dernière mode is



wholly made up of "signifiants de mode" without "signifiés" (most of the costumes evoked did not exist), so that Mallarmé succeeded in creating a purely immanent and reflexive semantic system. The Mallarmé reference recurs in all the main interviews Barthes gave after the publication of Système de la mode where he insists on the poetic dimension of the modes of meaning deployed in fashion. Insofar as it combines these two modes of meaning production, "la mode" is a double system divided between the pull towards the referential and the purity of the signifier. This clearly aligns it with literature, as Barthes frequently observes in passing. More significantly in our context, this doubleness of fashion, and the peculiar temporality it creates, will also associate it with a cluster of ideas - focused around such categories as the incident, Haiku, the "romanesque," and indeed the "quotidien" - which together constitute a way of thinking about the everyday in late Barthes.

In an appendix titled "Histoire et diachronie de la mode," Barthes argues that his account of the peculiar temporality of fashion and his description of it as a semiotic system confirm the findings of other investigators. In particular he cites the work of Kroeber, an American ethnographer whose study of three centuries of women's clothing suggested that historical events had very little impact on the evolution of fashion which was in fact cyclical. Kroeber showed that fashions undergo major changes according to a regular rhythm, alternating forms such as the length or width of the skirt in a rational order every fifty years or so. Thus the annual rhythm of change dictated by "la mode écrite" - the intense "micro-diachronie" of "variation saisonnière" which aims to get us to replace clothes before they are worn out - has no basis in actual historical determinants and indeed only works because of the very short-term memory of the buyer. A whole rhetoric of creative intuition and individual genius surrounding designers, and an obsession with the new, serve to disguise pure systematicity. Barthes develops this point amusingly in a piece on the rivalry between Coco Chanel and the 60s Wunderkind Courrèges. By aiming at a timeless style with her trademark tailleurs Chanel sought to escape from the fashion system since, according to Barthes, "la durée" is "la chose même qui nie la mode" (1994:414). Whereas Courrèges not only exploits fully the "sentiment violent du temps" at work in fashion, but does so in the context of a new sociological development, the emergence of "la jeunesse." For Barthes the "match Chanel- Courrèges" points to the way fashion in modern society bears not only on what people wear but acts for the public at large as a conduit for their understanding - their reading - of the society they live in: "Passé dans cette grande culture de tous les jours, à laquelle nous participons par tout ce que nous lisons et nous voyons, le style Chanel et la mode Courrèges forment une opposition qui est beaucoup moins la matière d'un choix que l'objet d'une lecture" (1994:416). The opposition of the two couturiers serves to signify our time, thus making fashion "un objet vraiment poétique, constitué collectivement pour nous donner le spectacle profond d'une ambiguïté, et non l'embarras d'un choix inutile" (1994:414).

As this last quotation makes clear, Barthes sees fashion as a phenomenon in which we participate collectively through a two-way process where fashion signs are produced and consumed independently of any actual purchase or wearing of clothes or objects. To approach fashion as a signifying system rather than as a business, an industry, or a sociological sector makes it less rather than more remote from the everyday lives of individuals since it foregrounds the medium (language) through which we engage with it. Fashion is relayed to us primarily through words and images (nearly always dependent on words, as Barthes stresses) rather than tangible fabrics and flesh-and-blood bodies. Thus the empirical dimension of Système de la mode lies in its privileging of the signifier, and here there is much evidence of what Barthes refers to elsewhere as "l'optimisme du signifiant." Whilst he does not neglect to



underline the poverty of its basic contents, Barthes does not pass a negative judgement on the fashion system. This is because his analysis of the ways in which meanings are produced does not depend on the sinister manipulation of a victimised public but on playful participation in a game of meaning which often has a quasi- poetic dimension. It may be that Barthes idealises fashion, but if so it is by seeing it as a source of pleasure and potential liberation. Essentially poetic through their dependence on the play of the signifier, the modes of signification at work in the fashion system are viewed positively because they liberate rather than fix meaning. For Barthes the play of the signifier and the exemption from meaning have existential spin-offs that can be manifested in life-styles attuned to the everyday present. In later writings Barthes will explore this idea in a number of contexts, including Japanese life, being in love, and photography. But other thinkers, notably Jean Baudrillard in the first instance, will develop the connection between fashion, signification and life-style. Before going on to Baudrillard, however, it is worth looking at negative reactions to Barthes's optimistic view of the fashion system on the part of two figures with a close interest in the everyday, Henri Lefebvre and Georges Perec. Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre' s extensive efforts to elaborate a theory of everyday life, and his close personal and intellectual links with Barthes, lead to a discussion of fashion in the book he was writing when Système de la mode appeared, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968). But although he seems fully to endorse Barthes's account of how the fashion system works, Lefebvre takes a diametrically opposed view of the primacy of the linguistic dimension. The self-contained universe of "la mode" is seen not as a tribute to the extraordinary richness and creativity of our sense-making capacity ("la capacité de fabriquer du sens avec rien," as Barthes puts it) but as the baleful outcome of a cancerous growth of the linguistic. For Lefebvre the excess of signifiers over signifieds which brings about what he calls "la chute des referendeis" (209) is an "opération scabreuse" characteristic of the damage to everyday life inflicted by the "société bureaucratique de consommation dirigée." Essentially Lefebvre sees fashion in terms of a conflict between constraint - factors that perpetuate the negative features of everyday life: meaningless repetition, lack of variety, atomisation - and appropriation - factors that tend towards the positive transformation of everyday life by fostering the sense of the everyday as a totality in which human possibility can be realised. Contrariwise, in different ways Baudrillard, Lipovetsky and Maffesoli- taking their lead from Barthes- will align fashion with appropriation. They will see in fashion a way of throwing off the burden of the past - and of embracing the new and the now - "le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" - in an energising way. Lefebvre, on the other hand, sees the Barthesian analysis of fashion as a confirmation that the agents of contrainte (and enemies of appropriation) in contemporary society are basically linguistic. The predominance of metalanguage leads to the rise of self-contained "sous-systèmes" - such as fashion, sexuality, youth, cars - which work against the everyday as totality by promoting themselves as autonomous harbingers of social goods. Where for Barthes the "tyrannical" aspect of fashion is largely rhetorical, Lefebvre' s analysis chimes with the conventional view - to be vigorously opposed by Certeau in L'invention du quotidien (1980) - of consumers as victims. This is also the view, where fashion is concerned, of Georges Perec.


1 50 Michael Sheringham

Perec

Although Perec denied that his hugely influential 1966 novel Les choses was simply an attack on the consumer society, it is clear that the young couple Jerome and Sylvie are enslaved by their addiction to brands and images drawn from magazines. In a series of short journalistic pieces, generally under the heading "L'esprit des choses," written for Arts Loisirs magazine in 1966-67, Perec went on to expound the view that "la mode" was essentially a form of terrorism, a system admitting no criteria other than those it arbitrarily sets for itself. Later, in a 1976 text entitled "Douze regards obliques," he offers a far more subtle but equally uncompromising critique of fashion. He begins by attacking "la mode" for its immorality, citing the exploitation of children to advertise clothing brands, and for its social exclusivity, encouraged by the obsession with labels. Like Lefebvre he bemoans the way fashion works by making signs more important than things, thus engendering a rapid turn-over without substance. Unlike Barthes (Perec had detested Système de la mode) he does not see this as a "douce tyrannie" (47). If "la mode" ought to be a "forme de jouissance," associated with pleasure, play and imagination, in modern society it is in practice simply loud and frenetic: "ça casse les oreilles." Where it might resemble the gentle fads and enthusiasms of the school playground, fashion actually exploits notions of innocence and inventiveness for its own ends. Despite what "diverses idéologies contemporaines" (a dig at Barthes and Baudrillard) may claim, fashion is not gentle but violent: "la mode [...] parle de caprice, de spontanéité, de fantaisie, d'invention, de frivolité. Mais ce sont des mensonges : la mode est entièrement du côté de la violence : violence de la conformité, de l'adhérence aux modèles, violence du consensus social et des mépris qu'il dissimule" (51). Perec goes on to suggest various ways in which fashion might be subjected to "détournement," before offering a more personal view of how the alleged tyranny of fashion could be opposed. Interestingly, Perec reveals that for him the problem is not that fashion overvalues the present but that it denies it. He explains what he means by contrasting fashion rhetoric with the lists of preferences in the Pillow Book of Sei Shônagon. Fashion plays a part in her choices, just as (Perec concedes) it no doubt influenced the collection of objects on his own writing table. But for the most part, he claims, the present disclosed by these chosen things is "ce qui est là, ce qui est ancré, permanent, résistant, habité : l'objet et son souvenir, l'être et son histoire" (55). Perec's sense of the present in fact has many echoes of both Baudelaire's "mémoire du présent" and Barthes's account of attending to the everyday life of Japan in L'empire des signes, where, notably through his account of the "justesse" of Haiku - "une sorte d'accent absolu... un pli léger dont est pincée, d'un coup preste, la page de la vie, la soie du langage" (1980:100-01) - he celebrates that "déception" or "exemption du sens" he had first located in the mode of signification proper to fashion. But Perec's desire, rooted in his personal history, to keep open the channels between the past and the present make him reluctant to see any connection between the modality of the present he values, and the mechanisms of the fashion system. Perec will have no truck with fashion's forgetfulness. Baudrillard

Like Lefebvre, Baudrillard follows Barthes in seeing fashion in the context of the autonomous logic of signs and their independence from reference. But rather than seeing the logic of fashion as terroristic, he implicitly rejects the opposition between contrainte and appropriation and sees "la mode" as an inescapable symptom of modernity: "la modernité est un code et la mode est son emblème" (1976:135). In his Barthes-inspired study of the "system" of objects (1968) Baudrillard discusses at length the relationship between series and models. A few basic types of car - the



Ariane, the 4L - can generate a vast range of models via minor differences of equipment and trim: "C'est cette sérialité seconde qui constitue la mode" (1968:199), "[p]our devenir objet de consommation il faut que l'objet devienne signe" (1968:277), a point Baudrillard illustrates by quoting at length from Perec's Les choses - "tout y est signe, et signe pur" (1968:279). Developing this argument in La société de consommation (1970), he see consumption as the "organisation totale de la quotidienneté," with the arbitrary "cycle de la mode" as its base. "La consommation" is the "généralisation" of the "processus combinatoires de la mode [qui] peut jouer sur tout" (1986:221). The logic of fashion binds modern society together. The shop window is "le foyer de convection de nos pratiques urbaines," "le lieu [...] de cette communication et de cet échange des valeurs par où toute une société s'homogénéise par acculturation quotidienne incessante à la logique, silencieuse et spectaculaire, de la mode" (1986:264). At the end of a very Barthesian passage Baudrillard notes that "le sujet de la consommation, c'est l'ordre des signes" (1986:310).

But this is not merely a matter of standardisation or loss of individuality. In a more radical, but also more positive way - at least in the perspective of a Nietzsche or a Bataille - "la mode" plays a central role in the overall argument of L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) which carries the seeds of most of Baudrillard' s later work. In "La mode ou la féerie du code," a long chapter made up of a series of mini- essays of varying lengths, the opening essay asserts that "[t]out aujourd'hui est affecté dans son principe d'identité par la mode" (1976:132). Nothing is immune from the "jeu structural de la valeur." Baudrillard talks of the "privilège étonnant de la mode" which has the capacity to blot out the empirical world by "l'accélération du seul jeu différentiel des signifiants [qui] y devient éclatante jusqu'à la féerie - féerie et vertige qui sont ceux de la perte de tout référentiel" (1976:131). Fashion signs are endlessly commutable and permutable: theirs is an "émancipation inouie" and this applies in the sphere of "signes légers" - like clothes, bodies, objects - and in the sphere of "signes lourds" - politics, morality, economics, science, culture, sexuality - , all haunted by "l'investissement inexorable de tous les domaines par le code." For Baudrillard this represents a radical break with the whole order of representation: "la rupture d'un ordre imaginaire... celui de la Raison referentielle sous toutes ses formes" (1976:131). We can enjoy this "liquidation du sens"- this "finalité sans fin" of "la mode"- especially at the level of the body; hence the affinity between fashion and dress, even if it is painful too to see all values go the way of fashion, a break even more radical than that of Capitalism which saw the victory of "la loi marchande."

With regard to temporality Baudrillard argues that "la mode, c'est paradoxalement l'inactueV9 (1976:132). Fashion has the power to make all forms revert to "l'inorigine et la récurrence": "la mode est toujours rétro, mais sur la base de l'abolition du passé : mort et résurrection spectrale des formes." The motifs of speciality and death - central to Baudrillard' s thinking about simulacra and hyperreality - are exploited to the full. Fashion presupposes that forms are already dead so that in cyclical recurrence they can haunt the present "de leur inactualité, de tout le charme du revenir opposé au devenir des structures": "Ainsi la jouissance de la mode est celle d'un monde spectral et cyclique de formes révolues, mais ressuscitées sans fin comme signes efficaces" (1976:133). Here Baudrillard cites historical work, also noted by Barthes, on the cyclical nature of fashion and the way at their apogee fashions tend to self-destruct.

But fashion is not simply endless re-cycling. The "structure de mode" is at the heart of modernity's alternation of the linear and the cyclical which both fosters and undermines a central myth of change. In this respect "la mode" does not simply



engage with superficial aspects but goes to the heart of "la production même du sens" (1976:136) in all spheres, including intellectual disciplines and cultural fields. "La mode" is a "forme universelle" (1976:139), and underlying it is a "pulsion de mode" - a "désir violent d'abolition du sens et d'immersion dans les signes purs" (1976:141) which has clear affinities with the "jouissance" Barthes ascribes to "l'exemption du sens." Like Barthes, Baudrillard steers his discussion round to the question of "modes de vie." The issue is not simply the impact of fashion on our daily lives or its link to choices of life-style. Following Barthes very closely, and quoting a number of passages from Système de la mode, Baudrillard rhapsodises over the way "un trait de mode circule, diffuse à une allure vertigineuse à travers tout le corps social, scellant son intégration et ramassant toutes les identifications" (1976:141). Offering scope for a "jouissance de l'arbitraire," an "esthétique de la manipulation," a "passion de l'artificiel" - "la perfection d'un système où rien s'échange contre le réel" - , the subversive power of fashion lies in its frivolity and the way for individuals it can become a kind of "fête": "elle devient pour chacun un lieu intense - miroir d'un certain désir de sa propre image" (1976:143). Developing links between fashion and the body, Baudrillard notes that "la mode s'approfondit lorsqu'elle devient mise en scène du corps lui-même, lorsque le corps devient médium de la mode" (1976:146). And he sees this as part of a historical process, an extension of the sphere of fashion which culminates in a state where "la mode diffuse partout et devient le mode de vie tout simplement" (1976:146).

Lipovetsky

Since the mid-1970s the question of lifestyles has played a central role in theoretical discussions of fashion, thereby enhancing the links between fashion, the present and the everyday. In Barthes' s later writings, there is a close connection between the theme of the art de vivre and the elaboration of a cluster of ideas about the

"quotidien." This can clearly be linked to the Foucault of Histoire de la sexaulité where "le souci de soi" and the aestheticisation of existence are explored partly in the context of ancient treatises on hedonism and the good life. The defence or celebration of fashion, and the connection between fashion and "mode de vie" are central themes

in two further contributions to the theorisation of fashion: Gilles Lipovetsky' s L'empire de l'éphémère (1987) and Michel Maffesoli's Au creux des apparences (1991). In both cases the inheritance from Barthes and Baudrillard is clear: fashion does not simply possess social, political or economic meanings - expressing such social attitudes as youth, revolt, money. Rather it is the operation of fashion as a system, and particularly a regime of meaning, that is seen to have existential or ontological spin-offs. The phrase "logique de la mode" recurs constantly in Lipovetsky, who claims that in the age of "la mode achevée," "[e]lle n'est plus tant un secteur spécifique et périférique qu'une forme générale à l'œuvre dans le tout social. On est immergé dans la mode, un peu partout et de plus en plus, s'exerce la triple opération qui la définit en propre : l'éphémère, la séduction, la differentiation marginale" (183). Lipovetsky' s basic premise is that it is wrong to bemoan the progressive "emprise" of fashion (he misleadingly includes Baudrillard here), or to theorise fashion purely in terms of the achievement of social distinction, as Bourdieu does in the spirit of Veblen's classic analyses of "conspicuous consumption." (Bourdieu' s contributions to fashion theory - notably in articles such as "Le couturier et sa griffe" [1975] - are entirely on the lines of his overall argument in La distinction [1979] about individual social mobility and the accumulation of social capital.) Rather, Lipovetsky argues, in its consummate or total phase - that of "la mode achevée" - fashion serves the ends of democracy, enlightenment and individual autonomy. As it comes to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, fashion does not so



much programme us as allow an infinite range of ingredients out of which we can forge our own identity - not by conflict, emulation or rivalry with others, but by allowing us to fashion ourselves. His analysis of the logic or structure of fashion is based on the same elements as Barthes's: autonomous aesthetic logic, an uninterrupted chain of small variations, endless mobility, transitoriness, the ephemeral, an irreducibly aleatory and hence ahistorical character, the cult but also the "dignity" of the present (317). For Lipovetsky, the increasing hegemony of the "forme de la mode" fosters the "hyper-individuation" of human beings, and in doing so actually pacifies social conflict. As a "sujet ouvert et mobile au travers du kaléiodoscope de la marchandise" (207), the individual pursues his or her own personal goals through fashion, enjoying "un type d'identité foncièrement labile," grounded in individual autonomy, which nevertheless constitutes the apotheosis of modern individualism: "le système de la mode achevée... est un instrument d'individuation des personnes [...] chacun, sous le gouvernement de la mode, est davantage sujet de son existence privée, opérateur libre de sa vie par le truchement du surchoix dans lequel nous sommes immergés" (208). Maffesoli

For Michel Maffesoli, author of an influential work on the sociology of the everyday entitled La conquête du présent (1979), fashion is a particularly symptomatic indicator of a general trend towards what he sees as an aestheticisation of experience marked by the reign of appearances. Au creux des apparences - the title of Maffesoli's 1990 volume - there is a void that enables the creation of new - and again very labile (Lipovetsky's word) - identities in a process whose ethical validity Maffesoli seeks to establish (hence the subtitle: pour une éthique de V esthétique) by a celebration of fashion: "cela revient à reconnaître ses lettres de nobless au « frivole » : mode, « design », stylisme, etc., comme participant au terreau dans lequel va croître l'imaginaire social" (135). But his argument is diametrically opposed to Lipovetsky's because a central tenet is that the reign of appearances (rooted in all the features of the fashion system) does not foster individualism but social and collective existence. For Maffesoli the dominion of fashion augments the theatricality of everyday life where the subject, by aspiring to identification rather than identity, adopts a succession of masks which favour "la socialite" rather than leading to alienation.

Il est en effet évident que l'accent mis sur ce qui, dans tous les domaines, est changement, la prévalence du présentéisme, tout cela ne laisse que peu de place à l'individu substance (ou à l'individu structure) enclos sur lui-même, maître de lui et souverain du monde. L'asservissement de l'individu [à la mode] signifie ici sa dilution dans un ensemble plus vaste dont il n'est qu'un élément [...]. Cela veut dire que la mode, en ce qu'elle nous occupe ici : succession d'instants éternels, tend à privilégier le corps social en son entier ; elle tend à valoriser la théâtralité globale. (141)

The parading of the body through fashion - "le corps qui se pavanne" - is seen as a "facteur de socialite." It does not affirm individuality - "l'apparence est rien moins qu'individuelle" - but fosters new ways of being - "apparition du corps propre et disparition dans le corps collectif (144).

Maffesoli's account of fashion - which repeatedly harks back to Simmel - is the most rudimentary of those I have surveyed, whilst at the same time the one that most directly links it to the category of the everyday, by identifying and celebrating a new kind of "hédonisme du quotidien." My overall point is that all these contributors to the theorisation of fashion approach it in terms not so much of particular styles or


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institutions as processes of meaning and how they are apprehended by human subjects. Although they attribute very different and sometimes antithetical qualities to it, these theorists concur in presenting fashion not as a localised sector of experience but as a wide-ranging and very diffuse phenomenon. And in that respect I think they suggest affinities between the nature of fashion (or at least ways of seeing it) and the nature of the everyday. If we set aside the caveats of Lefebvre and Perec, and the all-embracing system of Bourdieu, we find a tradition in contemporary theory, stemming from Barthes, but drawing on earlier phases in the theorisation of fashion, where the "logic" of fashion as a signifying practice is seen not as tyrannical or enslaving but as offering opportunities for liberation. In Barthes' s case it is the "jouissance" of "l'exemption du sens" which, in his later work, is transplanted from avant-garde writing ("le Texte") to the "page de la vie." In Baudrillard, a more radical and apocalyptic form of liberation is involved. For Lipovetsky, the logic of fashion liberates individual autonomy, whilst for Maffesoli it offers opportunities for communion with the collective social body. Resolutely of the present, acknowledging the past only as a source of styles and looks to be recycled or rejected, fashion as process resists history and reveals itself to be in league with the dimension of everydayness which offers comparable resistance to fixity and regimentation.

Royal Holloway, University of London

WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. 1967. Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil.

Marty. Paris: Seuil. 413-16. Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes II. Ed. C. Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Baudrillard, Jean. 1968. Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard.

Gallimard.

Lefebvre, Henri. La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. [1968]. Idées. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

Lipovetsky, Gilles. L'empire de V éphémère : la mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes. [19871. Folio Essais. Paris, 1991.

Maffesoli, Michel. Au creux des apparences : pour une éthique de V esthétique. [1990]. Folio Essais. Paris, 1993.

Perec, Georges. "Douze regards obliques." [1976]. Penser/ Classer. Paris: Hachette, 1986.


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