Abstract
This year marks a half a century since Roland Barthes' The Fashion System (1967) was published. The classic text on representation of fashion was written in the time of the acceleration of fashion and the emergence of prêt-a-porter, in the time when practices and rules of cultural production of fashion - transformation of clothing to fashion - were developed.
Thinking about the arbitrariness of fashion, Barthes was the first theorist who turned to language in order to explain the "unnatural" essence of fashion, bringing structuralist methodology to the study of fashion. He builds his methodology on the hypothesis that clothing that we wear in our everyday life is secondary to clothing represented in the discourse, in the magazines.
As Barthes claims, in order to make possible the constant changes of fashion, "a simulacrum of the real garment" should be created. According to Barthes fashion clothing is a cultural construction that is built up by "a narrow instance of a fashion group" without natural meanings attributed to it.
However, in recent years fashion's modification of time has become much faster than "real time" and the discourse of fashion has been seriously challenged with issues of sustainability and overproduction. The paper discusses shifts in representation of ready-to-wear fashion in the context of the emerging cultural trend to celebrate the "slow lifestyle": quality of life, everyday aesthetic and personal relationships with things.
Newcomer biannual magazines mediate new practices of transformation fashion back to clothing and represent current seasonal collections as long-lasting. The paper analyses verbal structures of clothes presented in magazines that promote long-lasting fashion and discusses the changes in vocabulary and the correspondence between words and images.
The paper tries to unpack the rhetorical codes of "fashion-as-anti fashion" by using tools developed by Barthes.