The Language of Fashion: Critical Reflections on Fashion Discourses

Abstract

Fashion has been personified as the younger sister of Death, a daughter of Caducity (Leopardi 1982). It has been described as capitalism’s favourite child, conceptualised as a belief, a system, an empire (Briggs 2013; Kawamura 2023; Lipovetsky 1987). These characterisations are not merely rhetorical flourishes. They suggest that fashion’s most durable power lies not only in what it makes or sells but in what it says, and in the authority it has accumulated to say it. That authority — what fashion says, how it says it, and what it is organised not to say — is the subject of this issue. When Roland Barthes anatomised the fashion system in 1967, his central insight was both simple and disquieting: fashion's written language does not describe garments so much as it produces them. The magazine caption, the press release, the seasonal trend report: these are not neutral communications but active interventions that transform cloth and cut into meaning, desire, and social value (Barthes 1967). Fashion’s self-description, Barthes argued, is a semiotic machine of extraordinary precision. It is also, he might have added, a machine with a remarkable capacity for concealment. Berger’s analysis of fashion's public discourse extends this insight, demonstrating how the industry's communicative frameworks operate not merely as description but as ideological infrastructure, organising what can be said, by whom, and in whose interests (Berger 2026). More than half a century after Barthes, that machine has grown considerably more complex. Fashion discourse now circulates across runway shows and Instagram reels, sustainability reports and activist zines, e-commerce copy and metaverse marketplaces, academic journals and influencer captions. The sheer proliferation of contexts in which fashion is spoken, written, and imaged might suggest that the system has opened up; that its formerly narrow self-description has expanded to accommodate a fuller range of voices, concerns, and ways of knowing. This issue of Fashion Highlight asks whether that is true, and at what cost. The response that emerges is not comfortable, though it may not be surprising. Fashion’s discursive field has indeed expanded. But expansion is not the same as transformation. What the papers in this issue demonstrate, from multiple disciplinary vantage points and across several continents, is that fashion’s dominant language continues to stabilise certain meanings while displacing others, and this stabilisation is not neutral. The meanings that are fixed, legitimised, and rendered legible are overwhelmingly those that serve white, ‘western’ subjects and their histories, while the aesthetics, labour, knowledge systems, and lived experiences of those positioned outside this centre are routinely absorbed, mistranslated, or rendered peripheral (Wild 2024, 2026; Berger 2026). What is rendered visible and what remains structurally unspeakable are, in this sense, racialised and geopolitical questions as much as discursive ones. The challenge for fashion studies, and for the industry it examines, is to develop the critical literacy to name what is being concealed, and the methodological tools to study it rigorously.