What is it about?
What happens when fashion design is converted into language? Roland Barthes’s thought-provoking question, from his 1967 influential book on the significance of language in fashion magazines, entitled Système de la Mode, frames this inquiry. Looking at the representations of Schiaparelli designs in Vogue Paris between 1936 and 1938, when the designer collaborated most with surrealist artists, this study traces the process whereby the French magazine appropriates Surrealism in order to present a restrained vision of experimental design. Contrary to the revolutionary message of Schiaparelli’s original creations, Vogue’s renditions of them are familiar and glamorous, generating a narrow ideological discourse that redefines Surrealism as a consumable product.
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This page is a summary of: Performative fashion discourse: Vogue Paris and Elsa Schiaparelli, International Journal of Fashion Studies, April 2016, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/infs.3.1.69_1.
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