Reviews for The fashion system

The average rating for The fashion system based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-08 00:00:00 Barry Koch "Fashion is both too serious and too frivolous at the same time, and it is in this intentionally complementary interplay of excess that it finds a solution to a fundamental contradiction which constantly threatens to destroy its fragile prestige: in point of fact, Fashion cannot be literally serious, for that would be to oppose common sense ( of which it is respectful on principle), which easily deems Fashion's activity idle; conversely, Fashion cannot be ironic and put its own being in question; a garment must remain, in its own language, both essential (it gives Fashion life) and accessory (common sense considers it thus); whence a rhetoric which is sometimes sublime, giving Fashion the security of an entirely nominal culture, sometimes familiar, shifting the garment to a universe of "little things." Moreover, it is probable that the juxtaposition of the excessively serious and the excessively frivolous, which is the basis for the rhetoric of Fashion, merely reproduces, on the level of clothing, the mythic situation of Women in Western civilization, at once sublime and childlike."

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-21 00:00:00 Joshua Bailey A totally insane, wacky, uber-smart, poetic, at times hard to read, incredibly beautiful, slightly eccentric reading of the world of fashion through the eyes of one of the great readers as well as writer Roland Barthes. I want to give this book five stars, but four makes it more mysterious for some reason or another. Yet probably the best book that tells you how to read inbetween the words and 'image' of fashion.