The texts of the book testify to a decade-long contemplation (1957-1969) by Roland Barthes on clothing, which he believed to be a total social phenomenon. This contemplation would culminate, moreover, in the brilliant semiological analysis of his book The Fashion System (1967).

Starting from Saussure's vision of a total science of signs, the author goes beyond the traditional historiography of clothing (with detailed inventories of valuable garments from the past or their correlation with the "spirit of the times"), boldly applying the achievements of linguistics to the study of clothing. He encourages us to see dress not as an endless renewal but as a system governed by profound regularity.

This internal adventure of the forms of clothing must be studied before being associated with any historical event. Because clothing, beyond its purely practical and decorative function, primarily serves as a system that performs a signifying function.

For its better explanation, the author will theoretically define concepts such as dandyism, detail, fashion, chic, distinction, and taste. "Fashion is essentially the collective imitation of a normative innovation. Even when it uses the expression of individuality, or, as they say today, of 'personality,' it is fundamentally a mass phenomenon, particularly beloved by sociologists, since they discover in it the privileged example of a clear dialectic between the individual and the collective."

[...] Fashion is an institution, and no one can believe today that it produces distinction: only the out-of-date is a concept that produces distinction. In other words, from a mass perspective, Fashion is always perceived only through its opposite: Fashion is health, it is morality, and the out-of-date is simply the illness or perversion of it." Roland Barthes