904
ROLAND BARTHES
And now, let us consider what a good costume would be; and
since we have acknowledged its functional nature, let us attempt to
define the kind of prestations to which it is committed. For myself,
I
see at least two, which are essential:
First of all,
the costume must be an argument.
This intellectual
function of costume
is
generally buried today under the parasitical
functions we have just reviewed (verism, esthetics, money). Yet in
all the great periods of theater, costume had a powerful semantic value;
it was not there only to be seen, it was also there to be
read,
it com–
municated ideas, information or sentiments.
The intellectual or cognitive cell of the costume, its basic element,
is the
sign.
We have, in a tale from the
Thousand
&
One Nights,
a
magnificent example of the vestimentary sign: we are told that when–
ever he was angry, the Caliph Haroun aI-Rashid put on a red gown.
Here the Caliph's red gown is a sign, the spectacular
sign
of his anger;
it
is
empowered to transmit visually to the Caliph's subjects a datum
of the cognitive order: the sovereign's state of mind and all the con–
sequences it implies.
Powerful, popular and civic theaters have always utilized a pre–
cise vestimentary code, they have broadly practiced what we might
call a politics of the sign:
I
shall merely recall that among the Greeks,
his mask and the color of his ornaments proclaimed in advance a
character's social or emotional condition; that on the medieval church–
porch and the Elizabethan stage, the colors of the costumes, in certain
symbolic cases, pennitted a diacritical reading, so to speak, of the state
of the actors; and that finally in the
Commedia dell'arte,
each psy–
chological type possessed its own conventional clothing.
It
is bourgeois
romanticism which, diminishing its confidence in the public's intel–
lective power, has dissolved the sign in a sort of archeological truth
of costume: the sign has deteriorated into a detail, we have taken to
producing veridical costumes and no longer significant ones. This
debauch of imitation achieved its culminating point in the baroque
of the nineteen hundreds--a veritable pandemonium of costume.
Since we have just sketched a pathology of costume, we must
now indicate some of the diseases which may affect the vestimentary
sign.
These are, in a sense, the maladies of nutrition: the sign
is
sick
whenever it is over- or underfed on meaning.
I
shall cite only the
