Abstract
The paper introduces research in progress that investigates an emerging version of fashion culture by studying the mediation of "actual", "personal" and long-lasting fashion in increasingly successful biannual magazines (The Gentlewoman, Fantastic Man, Lula). Roland Barthes' methodology has been applied to analyse the material.
His landmark The Fashion System (1967) laid out the structural analysis of written clothing as described in magazines and remains the only large- scale study of the representation of fashion. Barthes defined fashion as something opposite to "natural", constructed by a narrow instance of a fashion group and reproduced every year anew.
A developing paradigm, termed here post-prê t-a -porter, is instead characterised by a rejection of trends, a focus on the "relevant" sides of garments and a deceleration of cycles. The paper analyses verbal structures of clothes as presented in magazines that promote "real fashion" and discusses the changes in vocabulary and references compared to the prê t-a -porter era in which Barthes wrote.
The paper argues that signs in contemporary fashion are not fully arbitrary and that they are motivated to a higher degree than in Barthes' system. In the representation of post-prê t-a -porter fashion the shift from the symbolic function of fashion to its aesthetic function is distinctive.
In deprioritising the demand for newness, biannual magazines restore the real signs of utility. The article begins a discussion about shifts in representation of fashion in the context of the emerging cultural trend of celebrating "slow lifestyles".