The Fashion System

In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine—the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion—Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."

• The Language of Fashion (Bloomsbury Revelations)
• Seeing Through Clothes
• The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever
• Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
• Looking at Textiles: A Guide to Technical Terms
• Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
• 5,000 Years of Textiles
• Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity
• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
• Fashion (Oxford History of Art)