FASHION QUOTES V
quotations about fashion
Fashion is an international language.
SUE JENKYN JONES
Fashion Design
There are certain things that even fashion cannot justify.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
I would argue that fashion is a space where industry articulates issues of identity and signification for the purposes of competitive advantage to such a degree that culture and economy become mutually constitutive to the extent of being analytically inseparable.
ADAM BRIGGS
Fashion and Modernity
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Fashion ... is most capricious in her favours, often running from those that pursue her, and coming round to those that stand still. It were mad to follow her, and rash to oppose her, but neither rash nor mad to despise her.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Fashion is unjustly spoken of as presiding only in the festive dance, the lighted hall, the crowded court. Would that her influence were confined to these alone! but, alas! we find her in the most sedate assemblies, cooling down each tint of coloring that else might glow too warmly, smoothing off excrescences, and rounding angles to one general uniformity of shape and tone. Her task, however, is but a short one here, and she passes on through all the busy haunts of life, neglecting neither high nor low, nor rich nor poor, until she enters the very sanctuary, and bows before the altar, not only walking with the multitude who keep the holy day, but bending in sable sorrow over the last and dearest friend committed to the tomb. Yes, there is something monstrous in the thought, that we cannot weep for the dead, but fashion must disguise our grief; and that we cannot stand before the altar, and pronounce that solemn vow, which the deep heart of woman alone can fully comprehend, but fashion must be especially consulted there.
SARAH STICKNEY ELLIS
The Women of England
Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds
[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz
No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction.
CHRISTIAN DIOR
attributed, Dress Code
It should never be forgotten that any one who makes himself a slave to fashion is just as pusillanimous as one who makes himself a slave to any other master.
JACOB WILSON
Self-Control
Singularity in dress argues eccentricity of character. A queer cut of the coat represents a crotchet in the brain.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.
JAMES LAVER
"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959
There is not so variable a thing in Nature as a lady's head-dress.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Jun. 22, The Spectator, Jun. 22, 1711
I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting ... but whatever it's worth I did it.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
"Some fashion wisdom from Yves Saint Laurent", USA Today, June 1, 2008
One of the most perplexing aspects of fashion is its preoccupation with change, and hence with time. Its mutability is the point. Even those who take (or claim to take) no particular interest in clothes will, by accident or passivity, nonetheless go with the fashion flow. A man who wore a doublet and hose in the sixteenth century will not be wearing such an outfit in any of the following centuries unless he's on his way to a costume party. You would either have to take great care of what you already own so you rarely needed to buy new things or go looking for passé ones to be completely out of fashion, which takes more work than being in fashion.
LINDA GRANT
The Thoughtful Dresser
Feminist readings of fashion have often portrayed it as a kind of conspiracy to distract women from the real affairs of society, namely economics and politics. Fashion has been seen as a device for confining women to an inferior social order, largely because it demands an unequal expenditure of time and money by women on activities which do not attract the professional attention and efforts of men. Fashion works to intensify self-absorption and thereby reduces the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of women.
JOANNE FINKELSTEIN
After a Fashion
In hindsight, my initial love for fashion was about hope and evolving to become the type of woman I wanted to be: strong, confident and feminine. I always loved the idea of dressing up--my wardrobe and how I present myself reflecting how I feel on the inside. That is what I do for other people now. I give women the means to express themselves and be who they are and who they aspire to be, and I think there is a real beauty in this.
RACHEL ROY
Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2007
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
OSCAR WILDE
The Happy Prince
While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.
REBECCA MEAD
"The Last Designer," New York Magazine, Sep. 16, 1996