The Fashion System as Sign Itself: Surprise, Seduction and the Wit of Viktor & Rolf

Abstract

I have previously argued that aspects of fashion’s appeal and allure are bound up in a concept of wit. This wit is comprised of surprise—the sudden provision of an unexpected creative insight via a novel quip or image or—and seduction—pleasurable play, mutual challenge, and the desire to led astray from orthodox thinking in intriguing ways. However within fashion studies, the idea prevails that fashion is largely regarded as explicable in terms of a singular, integrated, commercially-oriented fashion system. I will examine Roland Barthes’ influential The Fashion System to explore how the idea of the “fashion system” functions as a sign of fashion itself. I will then analyze the oeuvre of Viktor & Rolf—couturiers who explicitly and persistently comment on the construction of the “fashion system”—to demonstrate how their work might critique and complement this system through a theoretical conception of wit.

Keywords:

• Fashion system
• fashion systems
• Barthes
• wit
• Viktor & Rolf

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Viktor & Rolf themselves state: “We just did not feel like doing a collection… The word ‘no’ was popping up in all our sketches. Then while drawing coats we thought, why resist it?… Afterwards we felt liberated” (Loriot 2016, 104).

2 Lurie’s Language of Clothes (1981) [1992] is an early exception though it has been much derided for its over-literal approach. For more nuanced elaborations of Barthes’ methodology in contemporary fashion magazines, see Moeran’s analysis of Japanese magazines (2004) and Konig’s (2006) study on fashion writing in Vogue. What is perhaps most remarkable is that Barthes himself did not return to further refine the project or to address the proposed program of work suggested by the text. After the publication of The Fashion System, he preferred to write shorter essays on the subject as collected in The Language of Fashion (2006).

3 For example, in one instance of an especially dense thicket of terminology, Barthes introduces the following: AUT, VEL, ET relations (following conventions of Latin grammar), semantemes, arch-semantemes, functives and functions (1967 [1983], 198–206).

4 For Barthes Fashion writing in magazines is a “collective vision” composed by a “group made up of editors” (1967 [1983], 228). Barthes writes that because this writing is “conventional and regulated” it cannot constitute an original “literature” but only “parade” it by copying its tone (228).

5 A further complication here is that the published Foreword is actually a second Foreword, replacing an earlier, imprecisely dated version “[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System” reproduced in The Language of Fashion (Barthes [1967] 2006). This version possesses a more technical language, although its broad points of emphasis are similar.

6 Other designers have, of course, deployed wit to comment on this fashion system—for example, Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealism delights in the incongruous rearrangement of elements (a hat for a shoe, and so on). More recently Alessandro Michele for Gucci is notable willingness to play with iterations of the house logo display a certain tongue-in-cheek flair.

7 Viktor and Rolf have written and published their own compendium of fashion-related tales, Fairy Tales (2011); The caption encapsulating their philosophy at the 2017 exhibition “Viktor & Rolf: Fashion Artists” presented at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, read: “We want our clothes to look like they’ve been made by the birds, in Cinderella.”

8 By this point, Viktor & Rolf’s reputation was well-known enough for themselves to be gently satirised; a garment from this collection was featured in a 2009 episode of The Simpsons TV series, “The Simpsons Go To Paris.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dita Svelte

Dita Svelte’s research focusses on the intersection between the sociology of wit and fashion. He argues that the surprising and seductive creative possibilities of wit can contribute to understanding fashion’s enduring appeal and powerful allure. [email protected]