FASHION QUOTES III
quotations about fashion
Fashion is not created by a single individual but by everyone involved in the production of fashion, and thus fashion is a collective activity.
YUNIYA KAWAMURA
Fashion-ology
Fashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But, being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep them.
ETIENNE PAVILLON
attributed, Other Men's Minds
Fashion is an inherent part of human social interaction and not the creation of an elite group of designers, producers, or marketers. Because of its basis in individual social comparison, fashion cannot be controlled without undermining its ultimate purpose, which is the expression of individual identity. If self-identity were never in doubt and social comparison never took place, there would be no demand for fashion, and there would be no need or opportunity for style change.
AUBREY CANNON
The Cultural and Historical Contexts of Fashion
A good model can advance fashion by ten years.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
Fashion is a mysterious chimera. Elegance, beauty and expense are no longer reliable guides to what is "cool". Outfits applauded on the runway often never make it to the stores.... Just as we get used to one "look", its counterpart comes into vogue. Why do we need or wish to consistently redefine and adorn ourselves? Who makes the rules and who breaks them? Fashion seems responsible for the mayhem, but it is also the creative source of an exciting and enormously profitable industry.
SUE JENKYN JONES
Fashion Design
Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.
YVES SAINT-LAURENT
New Woman
He alone is a man, who can resist the genius of the age, the tone of fashion, with vigorous simplicity and modest courage.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Girls do not set the fashions. They may and do exaggerate them, because there is very little else to distinguish one girl from another in the crowd, and because they are silly; but it is the woman who is just beginning to be on the wane, la femme presque passée, who wants to look still youthful and girlish, from whom proceed nine-tenths of the devices to conceal the figure and delude the eye.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
If we could only see, as those removed from our own sphere would see, the criminal folly of sacrificing beautiful and valuable lives to the fashion, which imposes naked necks as a rule of evening costume! Many a sweet young creature who would have lived into happy old age as a beloved wife and honored mother, has gone to an untimely grave because of that ball or that party at which she caught cold from exposure. But fashion so willed it; and neither mother nor daughter had strength to resist her impalpable but absolute decrees.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up.
JAMES LAVER
New Society, February 2, 1984
Fashion is not a real element of beauty in external objects; and to persons who possess a good endowment of Form, Constructiveness and Ideality, intrinsic elegance is much more pleasing and permanently agreeable, than forms of less merit, recommended merely by being new. Hence there is a beauty which never palls, and there are objects over which fashion exercises no control.
GEORGE COMBE
A System of Phrenology
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Fashion is a striving to overcome the spatial divide between classes, to overcome the invidious comparisons between "them and us", to catch up and overtake the "in crowd". In other words, what it would like to do is to abolish the very incline that enables the fashion dynamic to exist.
MICHAEL CARTER
Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes
Fashion is the sorceress to whose spell we all succumb, the tyrant whose will not one of us dares dispute, the ignis fatuus whose wavering flame we follow, indifferent to the nature of the ground through which we are led. Bog or brake--what does it matter? so long as we go precisely as we are told, and obey that mysterious and capricious leader of ours, we are all right; and if we do fall into odd places meanwhile, that is not our own fault but rather the misfortune of the times.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Catalog of the Exhibition Held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983
The apparel oft proclaims the man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
We smile at the women who are eagerly following the fashions in dress whilst we are as eagerly following the fashions in thought.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Fashion is all about who you are. It's about expressing your individuality and showing the world your personality. Fashion is not about looking like everyone else. So stand out!
LAURIE MCELROY
The New V.P.