Debating the role that fashion plays in and for materialism has not been the exclusive domain of historical materialists, who, as mentioned in the first chapter with regard to Baudrillard's change of method, tended to regard fashion as an insubstantial and unhelpful bourgeois distraction. A materialist critique of fashion that moved away from its visual or symbolic appearances was furthered, too, by structuralists and post-structuralists, who are active across the fields of sociology, philosophy and material culture. These theorists, schooled in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure as well as the semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce, in the anthropological approaches of Claude Lévi-Strauss and, especially, in the materialist sociology and philosophy of Henri Lefebvre, began to analyse between the 1940s and 1960s the language(s) of culture and media in structural terms, as well as developing a new concept of the ‘everyday’. As part of these attempts to challenge established cultural hierarchies, and through them to critique socio-political power structures as well as probing popular myths and manifestations, theorists looked at fashion in the broader sense of the word: 1) as anthropological signs that appear as objectified human behaviour (customs and costumes); 2) as an independent language with its codified material signifiers and signifieds (the fashion system); and 3) as an ambiguous field of socio-cultural production in which constant novelties and repeated ‘revolutions’ are propagated under the auspices of solidified social conventions – the aforementioned eternal recurrence of the new. Structuralist and post-structuralist views of fashion are directed by an interest in the transitory but powerful role it asserted in post-war capitalism, with its seemingly unrelenting appetite for materially exclusive creations, which, as we saw in the example of Dior in the second chapter, exist in a carefully cultivated habitat that is theatrically divorced from social reality. This counter-intuitive fascination on the part of a new generation of late materialist thinkers with culturally exclusive objects was qualified by a methodological engagement with fashion's structural aspects, its development of an independent semiotic language that had internal consistency while constantly changing its textual and visual elements. Such an interplay of self-renewing and self-reflexive signifieds within a culture of consumption revealed for these theorists fashion's untapped political potential.