essay by ROLAND BARTHES The french literary theorist, essayist, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes gained renown as one of the few philosophers who addressed the subject of fashion. He wrote the fashion system (1967), a seminal work that helped establish the scientific method in the newly emerging linguistic field of semiology. If today you open a history of our literature, you should find there the name of a new classical author: Coco Chanel. Chanel does not write with paper and ink (except in her leisure time), but with material, with forms and with colours; however, this does not stop her being commonly attributed with the authority and the panache of a writer of the classical age: elegant like Racine, Jansenist like Pascal (whom she quotes), philosophical like La Rochefoucauld (whom she imitates by delivering her own maxims to the public), sensitive like Madame de Sévigné and, finally, rebellious like the…