"Travelling from on dream to another"

Barthes, the fashion and the signs

Abstract

This paper is based on the book Système de la mode (1967) which Roland Barthes consecrated to fashion, an unavoidable phenomenon of social life of the early sixties of the XXth century, at a time when various revolutions were emerging. We are interested on investigating this theme in light of its analyses and reflections and, more precisely, the way in which it interacts with Barthes’s fundamentally open semiology. We delve into notions such as text, tissue, sense and imaginary, and we explore some of the implications for the own conception of literature (and its study) in Barthes, both from the point of view of the production and reception. In the end, this work on fashion offers itself as clarifying of various problems addressed by Barthes throughout his intellectual itinerary, and the most vital of all: the language.