ABSTRACT
In Harpers & Queen International (March 1985) David Cohen introduced its readers to the new translation of Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System. Fashion, he argued, ‘is simply a keyboard of signs from among which an eternal person chooses one day’s amusement’.1 Although this statement is employed to characterize the fashion of clothes, it is equally appropriate to describe the fashion of cultural studies, for the figure is apposite to reflection on the appropriation and deployment of Barthes’s notions in the field of cultural and media studies.
