Then an obscure researcher, Barthes was not to know that after his death (in 1980) he would become famous, commodified and mythic himself, with today’s centenary of his birth in 1915 heralded by academic conferences, a Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition in Paris and even a Hermès tribute scarf priced at €895.
In Mythologies, his influential 1957 collection of micro-essays on topics ranging from striptease to steak-frites, Gide to Garbo, Roland Barthes used “myth” to mean things wrongly taken to be natural, that which “goes without saying”, the “falsely obvious” – cultural phenomena or celebrity representations in need of “demystification”.
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